Merz's political survival at stake as German voters head to polls amid far-right surge

Sixteen months into his chancellorship, Friedrich Merz found himself anchored in Berlin on a Sunday that should have seen him at the United Nations, watching as voters in two German states prepared to render a verdict not just on regional governance but on the direction of a democracy under strain. With his approval at ten percent and the far-right AfD riding historic momentum from Saxony-Anhalt, the elections in Berlin and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania carried the weight of a larger question: whether the political center of Europe's largest economy could hold against forces it had long undere