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German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and CDU representatives held a press conference on Monday, September 21, after the party suffered its worst regional election defeat in postwar Germany. Merz called the result in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania a “disaster”, as the CDU fell below the 5% threshold for entering the state parliament. Helmut Schmidt fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the US, Markus Ziener, shares further details.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and CDU representatives held a press conference on Monday, September 21, after the party suffered its worst regional election defeat in postwar Germany. Merz called the result in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania a “disaster”, as the CDU fell below the 5% threshold for entering the state parliament. According to FRANCE 24 Europe editor Armen Georgian, Merz and his party’s Berlin candidate, Stefan Evers, offered no concrete solutions to address the historic defeat, despite pledging to keep the coalition together in the name of a “democratic future.”
Christian Democratic Union leadership throws its weight behind the chancellor ahead of two state elections this weekend.
Germany's far-right AfD is leading in polls ahead of regional elections in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania on September 20, while Chancellor Friedrich Merz's centre-right CDU has fallen to just 7%, according to a new ZDF poll. The result would mark the party's worst-ever showing in a regional election in Germany.
Carys Garland is pleased to welcome Markus Ziener, Visiting Senior Fellow at the German Marshall Fund. He interprets the AfD’s breakthrough in Saxony-Anhalt as a potentially historic turning point in post-war German politics. For Ziener, the significance lies not only in the scale of the far right’s electoral success, but also in the constituency behind it: many AfD voters, he argues, were previously politically disengaged rather than simply defecting from established parties. This complicates conventional explanations of the result as a straightforward transfer of support from the CDU to the AfD and raises a deeper question about the political expectations of a newly mobilised electorate.
Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) won key regional elections on Sunday by a landslide with at least 44 per cent of the vote in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, said exit polls by two public broadcasters. The AfD was far ahead of the centre-right CDU of Chancellor Friedrich Merz, which stood at 18.5 per cent, but it was too early to say whether the far-right party would win an absolute majority, said public broadcasters ARD and ZDF. The anti-immigration AfD is seeking to become...