The CDU failed to clear five percent in Mecklenburg — a first since 1949 — lost Berlin to The Left, and Saxony-Anhalt to the AfD. Germany's chancellor has the worst poll numbers in the survey's history.
Published 2 October 2026 · 14:01 GMT
STUTTGART — Minutes after the first exit polls flashed across German television screens, Chancellor Friedrich Merz walked before the cameras at his party's headquarters and declared that he was going nowhere. "It's a disaster," he said of the state elections in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania on September 20. "What needs to be done now requires backbone, steadfastness and patience. I will muster them — as party chairman of the CDU and, above all, as chancellor of our country." It was a statement of defiance. The problem for Merz is that Germany has now measured, with unusual precision, exactly how little of the country stands behind him.
On Thursday, a survey by the public broadcaster ARD found that only one in ten Germans were satisfied or very satisfied with the chancellor's work. It is the lowest figure for any chancellor since the survey began in 1997 — lower than the troughs of Gerhard Schröder's Agenda 2010 years, lower than Angela Merkel's refugee-crisis winters, lower than Olaf Scholz's final months. One in ten. In a country that prizes stability the way Germany does, that number is not a poll result. It is a verdict.
The elections that produced it were a rout on two fronts at once. In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the CDU failed to clear the five percent threshold needed to win seats in the state parliament — the first time the party has been shut out of a state legislature since the Federal Republic was founded in 1949. The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) came first with more than a third of the vote. On the same day, in Berlin's state elections, the CDU suffered another major setback: it finished second behind The Left, which won 25.7 percent of the vote and now hopes to form a government in the capital, coalition partners permitting. And just two weeks earlier, the AfD had won the state elections in Saxony-Anhalt outright, taking more than 40 percent of the vote against 17 percent for the CDU. The conservatives were beaten on the right by the far right and on the left by the left — a pincer movement with no precedent in the party's postwar history.
The CDU, it is worth remembering, is not some struggling minor party. It is the machine that has produced six of Germany's postwar chancellors, the party of Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Kohl and Angela Merkel, the self-declared Volkspartei — the people's party — that anchored the Federal Republic's entire political order. To be ejected from a state parliament for the first time since 1949 is not a bad night. It is a historical event. And it raises the question now echoing through Berlin: if the people's party can no longer clear five percent in the northeast, whom exactly does it represent?
The immediate answer from the chancellery is: Merz stays. Removing a German chancellor is, by constitutional design, deliberately hard. Under the Basic Law, the Bundestag can replace a chancellor only by simultaneously electing a successor with an absolute majority — the constructive vote of no confidence, invented precisely to prevent the revolving-door instability of the Weimar Republic. A party revolt could strip Merz of the CDU chairmanship; stripping him of the chancellery requires the opposition and the coalition's own ranks to agree on a replacement, in the same vote, with 50 percent plus one. As Wolfgang Schroeder, a professor of political science at the University of Kassel, told Al Jazeera: "The CDU is in a situation where it can't really get any further with Merz, but it also doesn't know how things would work without him. There is no attractive replacement, so there is no alternative."
That sentence — no further with him, no alternative without him — is the trap the entire German political establishment now sits in. Merz could face a revolt within his own party, and the knives are being sharpened in the usual Berlin way, through anonymous quotes and pointed silences. But a chancellor who cannot be replaced and cannot govern is a constitutional paradox made flesh, and Germany's partners are watching. This is Europe's largest economy, the anchor of the eurozone, the indispensable nation of every EU negotiation. A chancellor at 10 percent approval is not just a German problem. It is a European vacuum.
To understand how Merz arrived here, you have to understand the long road that brought him to the chancellery in the first place. Friedrich Merz is 70 years old and has wanted this job for a quarter of a century. A former chairman of the German supervisory board of the BlackRock investment company, he was the CDU's great hope in the early 2000s — until Angela Merkel outmaneuvered him, sidelined him, and then governed Germany for sixteen years while he sat in the corporate world, nursing his ambition. His comeback was one of the more improbable in European politics: after Merkel's departure, Merz clawed his way back through the party's conservative wing and finally took office in May 2025. He arrived promising clarity, business competence, and an end to the drift of the Scholz years. Seventeen months later, he has the worst poll numbers in the history of the measurement.
What went wrong is a matter of furious dispute inside the coalition he leads. The CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, govern with the Social Democratic Party (SPD) — and the government, by every account, is struggling amid the rising cost of living, deindustrialisation, crumbling infrastructure and a housing crisis in the major cities. Nils Diederich, a professor emeritus of political science at the Free University of Berlin and a former SPD member of the Bundestag, told Al Jazeera that Merz has failed to make a good impression but argued he is not the main reason for the CDU's poor results. "Overall, I see the coalition itself as the main problem," Diederich said. "The Social Democrats have worn themselves out in the coalition. They have lost their sense of direction and are putting the brakes on reforms. That, in turn, is dragging the CDU down with them."
The reform dilemma is where the coalition's paralysis becomes concrete. In July, the government announced a package of 34 measures — reforms to pensions, taxation, bureaucracy and the labour market. Merz had repeatedly promised to push his reforms through by the end of the year. But the state elections have put the coalition parties under greater pressure to stake out their own positions, and the package is now a battlefield. To ease the burden on people needing long-term care and to plug multibillion-euro deficits, the SPD is calling for a cap on care costs and for people with private health insurance to share the costs. The CDU firmly rejects both proposals on legal and financial grounds. State premiers from both major parties and the SPD leadership want to retain the option of retiring without a pension reduction after 45 years of contributions — a reward, they say, for a lifetime of work. The conservative bloc's business wing insists the provision be phased out. Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil of the SPD is planning new revenue measures to consolidate the budget but faces fierce resistance from CDU state premiers and conservative legislators determined to block any tax increases. Every reform is a front in a coalition civil war, and Merz — the man who promised to end the drift — presides over the stalemate.
Schroeder warned that the coming months could be difficult, and his formulation of the dilemma is worth quoting in full: "The CDU is caught in a dilemma. If Merz continues down the path of reforms that place a burden on society, the likelihood of cooperative governance with the SPD will diminish further. If he goes along with the course the SPD is proposing, pressure within the party will increase." It is a perfect trap: reform and lose the coalition, or conciliate and lose the party. Diederich put the endpoint bluntly: "If the reforms fall through, then either Merz or the Social Democrats would have to act and let the coalition collapse."
Behind the coalition arithmetic sits a deeper cultural wound, and Merz opened it himself. He has drawn sustained criticism for remarks about the country's "Stadtbild" — the cityscape — widely interpreted as a suggestion that there were too many refugees and migrants on German streets. The debate resurfaced in recent days, with prominent CDU figures returning to the issue after the poor election results, as if the lesson of the defeats were that the party had not been tough enough on migration. It is a revealing reflex. The AfD's surge — first place in Mecklenburg with over a third of the vote, over 40 percent in Saxony-Anhalt — is routinely attributed to migration anxiety. But the CDU's attempt to outflank the far right on its own terrain has a long and discouraging history in European politics: voters who want the hard line vote for the original, not the imitation, and moderate voters recoil from the imitation. The Stadtbild episode suggests a party that has not decided whether it wants to defeat the AfD or become it.
Now step back and consider the five dimensions of what is actually happening to Germany, because the Merz crisis is not really about one man. Geopolitically, Germany is the country the world needs to be stable and is not. The chancellor who took office promising to restore German leadership in Europe — on Ukraine, on defence spending, on the EU's strategic posture — now speaks with 10 percent of his own public behind him. Every summit, every negotiation, every promise of German commitment now carries an asterisk. Allies from Kyiv to Washington to Warsaw must calculate not what Merz says but whether he will survive to deliver it. A lame-duck chancellor in Berlin is a variable in every European equation.
Macroeconomically, the numbers behind the politics are grim. Deindustrialisation is not a slogan in Germany; it is a statistical fact. Energy costs reshaped by the loss of Russian pipeline gas, Chinese competition in the automotive and machinery sectors that were Germany's crown jewels, an infrastructure backlog measured in hundreds of billions, a housing crisis in the cities where the jobs are — this is the material base of the political crisis. The 34-measure reform package was supposed to be the answer. Instead it became the arena. And the deeper truth is that Germany's economic model — export-led, energy-cheap, demographically stable — has been under strain for a decade, through Merkel's final years and Scholz's entire chancellery. Merz inherited the strain and promised the cure. The voters have now rendered their interim judgment on the cure.
Demographically, the election map tells its own story. The AfD's triumphs came in the east — Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Saxony-Anhalt — the states of the former GDR, where the party has built a durable base on a cocktail of economic grievance, cultural alienation and distrust of Berlin. The Left's victory in Berlin came in the capital, powered by young voters, renters crushed by the housing crisis, and immigrant communities — the reporting noted rising hope in Berlin's immigrant neighbourhoods as the Left won amid AfD gains. Germany is sorting itself into political tribes by geography and generation, and the Volkspartei model — one big-tent party for the whole country — is the casualty. The CDU's pincer defeat is the demographic future arriving early: squeezed between an east that has left it for the far right and cities that have left it for the left.
The historical pattern is the cruelest cut. The five percent threshold was designed, after Weimar, to keep splinter parties out of parliaments and force stable majorities. For 76 years it did its job for the CDU — the party never once fell below it in a state election. Now the threshold has done its job against the CDU itself, ejecting the founders' party from a state legislature. There is a symmetry here that German historians will chew on for decades: the party of Adenauer, which built the Federal Republic's party system, being devoured by the fragmentation that system was designed to prevent. And the constructive vote of no confidence — the other great Weimar lesson, built into the Basic Law — now protects a chancellor whom 90 percent of the country does not want. The constitution is working as designed. Whether the design still serves the republic is the question Berlin is afraid to ask.
Structurally, Germany is living through the same party-system fragmentation that has remade politics across the West — but with a German specificity. The old three-and-a-half party system is gone. The AfD is no longer a protest phenomenon but a governing prospect in the east, polling above 40 percent in a major state. The Left, written off for dead a decade ago, just won Berlin with 25.7 percent. The SPD, the CDU's coalition partner, is itself a shadow of its former self. In this landscape, the firewall against the AfD — the refusal of all other parties to cooperate with it — holds at the federal level but strains more with every eastern election. The structural question is not whether Merz survives the autumn. It is whether the Federal Republic's party system can produce a stable government at all in the 2030s, or whether Germany is becoming ungovernable in the particular, orderly, German way: coalitions that cannot reform, chancellors who cannot be removed, elections that change nothing.
The perspectives on the crisis divide along the fault lines of German public life. Inside the CDU, the debate is between those who blame Merz's personal unpopularity — the Stadtbild gaffes, the BlackRock past, the sense of a man from another era — and those who, with Diederich, blame the coalition trap. Inside the SPD, the mood is grim satisfaction mixed with terror: the junior partner is dragging the senior partner down, but it is going down too. Among voters, the ARD number speaks: 90 percent dissatisfied. In the east, AfD voters see vindication — the system parties had it coming. In Berlin, Left voters see hope — a different Germany is possible. And in Brussels and Washington, the reaction is the quiet panic of allies who need Germany to function: a chancellor at 10 percent cannot lead Europe, and Europe without German leadership drifts.
What happens next has a date: April, when North Rhine-Westphalia — Germany's most populous state — elects a new parliament. It is the next major electoral test, and it will be fought under the shadow of everything that has just happened. A fourth defeat would make Merz's position untenable in any practical sense, whatever the constitution says. A recovery would buy him time, though time for what is unclear — the reform dilemma does not resolve itself. Schroeder's warning stands: the crisis of the chancellor can become a crisis of the CDU, and from there a crisis of the coalition. The fuse is lit. The only question is how long it burns.
There is a final irony worth sitting with. Friedrich Merz spent a quarter-century trying to become chancellor, was denied by Merkel, exiled to the corporate world, and engineered one of the great comebacks of European politics to take office in May 2025. He got the job. And the job, it turns out, is presiding over the rout of everything he built his career to lead. "Backbone, steadfastness and patience," he promised on election night. Germany will now discover whether those are the virtues of a statesman — or the last words of a political era.
