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Friedrich Merz has been chancellor for just 16 months, and he’s already facing the kind of electoral test that could determine whether he serves out anything close to a full term. Voters in Berlin and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania went to the polls Sunday in elections that, on paper, are regional contests with no direct bearing on national government. In practice, they’ve become a referendum on Merz’s leadership, arriving just two weeks after a result in Saxony-Anhalt that sent shockwaves through German politics and left the chancellor’s position looking more precarious than at any point since he took office.
The immediate context for Sunday’s vote is impossible to separate from what happened in Saxony-Anhalt two weeks earlier, where the anti-immigration Alternative für Deutschland recorded its highest-ever result in any German regional election. The AfD fell just short of an outright majority there – a threshold that would have let it govern alone – and is now actively courting defectors from other parties in an attempt to become the first far-right force to control a German state government since the Nazi era. That single data point reframed the political stakes of every subsequent regional election this year, turning Sunday’s contests in Berlin and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania into tests of whether Saxony-Anhalt represented an isolated regional anomaly or the leading edge of a broader national shift.
Polling ahead of Sunday’s vote suggested the AfD would fall well short of replicating its Saxony-Anhalt breakthrough in either state, even amid what analysts describe as a palpable sense of continued momentum for the party. But falling short of an outright majority is a low bar; the more consequential question for Merz was always how much additional ground his own CDU would lose to the AfD in the process, given that the party’s rise has consistently drawn support directly from the conservative bloc Merz leads nationally.
The two elections presented distinct dynamics. In Berlin, one of Germany’s 16 federal states, the incumbent CDU was competing for first place against the far-left Die Linke, which built its campaign around a proposal to expropriate corporate landlords as a response to the capital’s severe housing affordability crisis – a genuinely resonant issue in a city where roughly 85% of households rent and advertised rents have nearly doubled since 2014, when Berlin was still known for its “poor but sexy” reputation under then-mayor Klaus Wowereit. Even in this famously cosmopolitan capital, the AfD polled strongly enough to place third or fourth, illustrating how far the party’s appeal has extended beyond its traditional rural and eastern German strongholds.
Berlin’s CDU also entered the race without its most recognizable figure. Incumbent mayor Kai Wegner abandoned his re-election bid in July after becoming entangled in a genuinely damaging controversy: contradictory explanations for having played tennis while large parts of Berlin experienced an arson-triggered power blackout the previous winter. His replacement, Berlin’s chief finance official Stefan Evers, failed to meaningfully improve the party’s standing in subsequent polling, leaving the CDU to contest a high-stakes election without the benefit of an incumbent’s usual advantages.
Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania presented an even more alarming scenario for Merz’s party. There, the AfD and the Social Democrats were locked in a tight race, while the CDU faced the possibility of its worst regional result in 75 years – potentially even falling below the 5% threshold required for parliamentary representation entirely, an outcome that would be unprecedented for the party in the entire postwar period. Regional CDU leaders in the state had already begun attributing their weak polling directly to Merz’s national unpopularity, a dynamic that, if borne out by Sunday’s actual results, would represent a direct and quantifiable cost of the chancellor’s declining standing on down-ballot party performance.
The backdrop to both races is Merz’s own remarkably poor personal standing. His approval ratings have fallen to just 10%, and his credibility has been undermined by what critics describe as broken campaign promises – most notably his pledge to return Germany, Europe’s largest economy, to sustained growth, and his commitment to substantially reduce support for the AfD, which remains both the largest opposition party in the Bundestag and the top-polling party nationally. Merz has responded to the pressure with defiance rather than concession, telling an industry audience that he was elected to a four-year term and intends to use that full mandate to lead the country through its current difficulties. He also canceled a planned appearance at the UN General Assembly in New York, with a government official saying his presence was required in Berlin in the aftermath of the elections – a scheduling decision that itself signals how seriously his own team is treating Sunday’s results.
Economist Holger Schmieding of Berenberg bank offered one of the more concrete assessments of Merz’s political vulnerability, estimating that the probability of a CDU internal revolt leading to Merz’s replacement had risen from roughly 20% ten days earlier to approximately 35% at the time of his research note – a meaningful jump that reflects genuine institutional anxiety within Merz’s own party, compounded by the effect of rising global petrol prices on an already frustrated electorate. Schmieding’s own baseline expectation was still that Merz would serve out his full term, but a rising one-in-three probability of an internal party revolt is not a marginal risk for any sitting chancellor to be carrying.
Part of what makes Merz’s position so difficult is that the policy responses available to him haven’t meaningfully blunted the AfD’s appeal. Some economic indicators have reportedly improved during his tenure, but those gains have been overshadowed by soaring living costs and deindustrialization in core sectors like automaking, where German manufacturers face intensifying competition from Chinese producers. Merz has also delivered on a significant reduction in new arrivals at Germany’s borders – one of his signature policy commitments – but that success has notably failed to win back AfD voters, suggesting the party’s support base is being driven by a broader cluster of grievances: economic anxiety, concerns about crime, and opposition to Merz’s staunch support for Ukraine, rather than immigration policy in isolation. That’s a genuinely difficult political problem, since it implies no single policy lever, however successfully executed, is likely to reverse the AfD’s momentum on its own.
The AfD’s Saxony-Anhalt breakthrough was built substantially on mobilizing previously non-voting citizens rather than simply converting supporters from other parties – a mobilization strategy that mainstream parties are now explicitly trying to counter with their own turnout push. Opponents of the AfD are hoping that the visible threat of a far-right party achieving genuine governing power will motivate supporters of mainstream democratic parties to turn out in response, a dynamic reinforced by tens of thousands of people who joined anti-AfD street protests in the wake of the Saxony-Anhalt result. Whether that counter-mobilization proves strong enough to offset the AfD’s own momentum, in either Berlin or Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, is likely to shape not just two regional governments, but the immediate trajectory of Merz’s own chancellorship heading into the remainder of his term.
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