Germany's Merz Faces State Losses

The story so far

As of September 21, 2026

Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, says he will stay in office after his party’s worst state-election results. The Christian Democratic Union took 4.9% in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, below the five percent cutoff that keeps parties out of the state parliament, and 19.1% in Berlin, finishing behind the Left Party on 25.3%. Two weeks earlier, the far-right Alternative for Germany won Saxony-Anhalt with 43.8% while the CDU fell to 17.2%, leaving AfD with 39 of 83 seats, three short of an outright majority.

The story has shifted from routine midterm setbacks to a test of the chancellor’s authority and the CDU’s hold on the political middle. Being shut out of a state legislature for the first time is the single data point that explains the panic: it turns a slide into a structural problem for a party that long defined Germany’s center. Merz skipped a planned trip to the United Nations to manage the fallout and insists he will press on. There is no open leadership challenge, but his personal rating is extremely low at 13%, which limits his leverage inside the party and with coalition partners.

What is at stake now is whether Merz can still drive his agenda of tax relief for lower and middle earners, a pension overhaul, and cutting bureaucracy, and whether his coalition with the Social Democrats holds steady as both flanks gain. The AfD is not yet in power in Berlin or Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania but is close to governing territory in the east. In Saxony-Anhalt, three missing seats and a small newcomer party’s stance on abstaining in leadership votes could test the long-standing refusal of other parties to help the AfD into office.

The immediate facts explain the broader drift: AfD strength at 37–44% in eastern contests, the Left topping the poll in Berlin, and the CDU falling under the five percent entry bar in one state show the center losing ground on both sides. Merz says the answer is to keep reforms on track, but the numbers now make every federal move a political fight, and every eastern statehouse a staging ground for whether Germany’s postwar norm of excluding the far right from power can still hold.