Recent state elections have been disastrous for Friedrich Merz, who now holds the title of least popular federal chancellor in German history. His Christian Democrat Union (CDU) has suffered catastrophic defeats, while the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) continues to gain strength. Merz and the political establishment he leads have been left struggling to adapt to a seismic shift in the country’s political landscape.
Two weeks ago, in an election in Saxony-Anhalt, the CDU’s vote share more than halved, falling to just 17 percent, while AfD, under the charismatic Ulrich Siegmund, won a stunning 44 percent of the vote. Saxony-Anhalt may thus become the first state with an AfD government, a prospect that has sent shockwaves through Germany’s “legacy” political parties—the center-right CDU as well as the center-left Social Democratic Party (SDP)—and prompted hysteria among the liberal media.
This past Sunday, elections in two more German states dealt further blows to the CDU.
In the north-east state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Merz’s party suffered near-total humiliation: With slightly less than 5 percent—a result that even the chancellor described as “disastrous”—the Christian Democrats failed to clear the threshold necessary to enter parliament. For the first time since 1949, there will be a German state legislature without a single CDU member. Meanwhile, the AfD won 38 percent of the vote, more than doubling its last result and running slightly ahead of the ruling Social Democrats.
And in Berlin, the post-communist Die Linke (“The Left”), led by its top candidate, Elif Eralp, came in first with 26 percent of the vote. Die Linke campaigned on a stridently left-wing agenda, pledging to nationalize large housing companies and offering vociferous criticism of Israel. (At one party event, a rapper performed a song that included the lyrics “death to the IDF,” sparking another debate about antisemitism within the left.) Berlin, with its large and growing Arab population and traditions of political radicalism, has proven fertile ground for this kind of approach. One head of a notorious Arab clan, who has multiple convicted criminal offenders in his extended family, paid a visit to the party’s victory celebration. The CDU fell to a distant second place with less than 19 percent of the votes, and AfD came in third with 16 percent.
The national figures also tell a grim story for Merz and his party. Merz has the lowest approval rating ever recorded for a German sitting chancellor, making him even less popular than his predecessor, Olaf Scholz. He has become a lightning rod for voters’ frustrations. According to a recent survey by pollster Forsa, only 13 percent of respondents are satisfied with Merz’s performance. During appearances, particularly in eastern Germany, he is routinely booed, whistled at, and jeered.
That the CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the CSU, are undergoing a historic decline is undeniable. Together, their favorability has dropped to roughly 20 percent, the lowest level of support in the postwar era. By contrast, AfD is riding high at nearly 30 percent in national polls (in the five states of the formerly communist East Germany, support is even higher). This, ironically enough, is exactly the opposite of what Merz claimed would happen in 2018, when he pledged to “halve AfD” as part of his bid for leadership of the CDU. That promise has come back to haunt him: In the nearly eight years since, support for AfD has more than doubled.
Part of this is due to Merz’s stumbles. The chancellor is a poor communicator who comes across as arrogant, bossy, and out of touch. He has committed numerous political blunders, including a botched cabinet reshuffle recently, and alienated many of his natural supporters. Those who hoped for a conservative turn under his leadership have been disappointed. His dysfunctional coalition with the Social Democrats is paralyzed and frozen in place, incapable of tackling the country’s fundamental problems.
But the problem is far bigger than Merz. Germany has been on a steeply downward path for quite some time, beginning with Angela Merkel’s 16 years in government. She left behind a catastrophic legacy of uncontrolled mass immigration, primarily from Muslim countries, resulting in enormous welfare costs, rising crime, social disintegration, and worsening conditions in schools and the housing market. And under her successors, Scholz and Merz, the economy has started to deteriorate rapidly as well.
For the past six years, Germany has either been in recession or stagnated. By comparison, real GDP in the United States has increased by more than 15 percent since 2020, while the economies of the United Kingdom, France, and Italy have grown by roughly 5 to 9 percent. Germany’s economy, by contrast, has grown by only 0.2 percent.
China was a profitable export market for German industrial products for more than two decades, but that relationship has now reversed. German companies are increasingly speaking of a “China shock” comparable to the one the United States experienced as a result of intense import competition in the 2000s.
But not all of the economic damage has come from Chinese competition. In a rash reaction to the Fukushima disaster in 2011, Merkel’s government decided to shut down the country’s nuclear power plants. To fill the gap, Germany imported more Russian natural gas. After Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, that has been stopped, and German energy costs have soared even higher. Thanks to failed green-energy policies, high taxes, and adverse geopolitical developments, Germany’s energy costs are now among the highest in Europe.
The combination of high energy costs, high taxes, welfare-state contributions, and bureaucratic red tape now places such a heavy burden on companies that Germany is experiencing record numbers of insolvencies. Core sectors of the German economy, such as the automotive and chemical industries, are now cutting thousands of jobs, shutting down plants, and even leaving the country altogether. Add to this the experience of mass migration and failed integration, declining public safety, and a political class that chose to ignore reality and silence its critics, and you are left with a picture of a country sleepwalking toward the abyss.
The old parties—particularly the CDU and the SPD—have sown the seeds of their own destruction. They are now much-diminished forces compared with what they were ten or twenty years ago. Faced with the rise of AfD, they are like so many deer caught in the headlights.
To fight AfD, they have tried a combination of repression and intimidation directed at its members and voters. As I’ve written before in these pages, such measures have included the domestic spy agency’s labelling of the party as “extremist”; massive public pressure and propaganda (including warnings about a supposed return of the Nazis); and the enlistment of public broadcasters and mainstream media, churches, publicly subsidized NGOs, and other organizations into a campaign of vilification. Yet these efforts have seemingly come to nothing.
Merz famously promised that “the left is over” when he campaigned to become chancellor in early 2025. But many German conservatives believe he has failed to deliver. It’s true that the Greens, who were the default hard-left option in public discourse and elite thinking for many years, are facing headwinds. But they remain a powerful force, and the CDU has not dared to fundamentally reverse course on major policy issues such as energy or migration. Merkel opened the borders to unlimited asylum migration in 2015. Under Merz, the number of new asylum seekers and refugees has been reduced, but the consequences of admitting something like 3 million migrants over the past decade remain.
The dysfunctional Merz government depends on a coalition with the Social Democrats that has achieved only limited reforms in areas such as welfare, taxation, and energy policy. A leading center-right CDU politician in the Bundestag, whom I spoke with last week, expressed deep frustration over the lack of progress. Some parts of the SPD would prefer to side with the post-communists. The coalition is holding together largely because both sides are bound by their fear of AfD.
The situation has triggered speculation that the Christian Democrats might seek to replace Merz. To shore up his position, last week the eight CDU minister-presidents who govern Germany’s federal states issued a statement seemingly signaling their support for Merz (though, interestingly, the document did not mention him by name, instead promising to “solve problems together with our chancellor”).
Although Merz is deeply unpopular and the CDU is reeling from recent electoral hammer blows, I don’t think he will be replaced anytime soon. The simple reason is that none of the CDU grandees in the states want his job under the current dire circumstances.
If Merz were to go, though, the most likely successor would be Hendrik Wüst, the telegenic and slick minister-president of North Rhine-Westphalia, who governs in coalition with the Greens. A federal government under Wüst’s leadership would probably move further to the left, in a bid to win over urban liberal voters. Wüst represents a tendency within the CDU that is willing to form a national government with the Greens. He has also called for a working group to consider initiating the process of banning AfD (a common rallying cry among the Left, the Greens, and the SPD).
It is an open question whether a Germany that bans its most popular political party would still be a democracy. That such a move is even under consideration speaks to the depth and intensity of the divisions currently roiling German politics.
And although AfD seems here to stay, it has heretofore only acted as an opposition force. So if the party succeeds in forming a government in Saxony-Anhalt, things could take yet another turn. Governing would compel the party to demonstrate its administrative capabilities, putting it in charge of a state in a rather dire fiscal situation. Not only would putting the state’s finances in order come as a reality check, but AfD would also be under significant pressure to make good on its promises to deport large numbers of illegal or criminal migrants. Given the legal constraints in the German system, that is far easier said than done.
But whatever happens at the state level, the grievances that have propelled AfD’s rise have remade the political landscape. To acknowledge this new reality, Germany’s so-called liberal elites should accept that the party is a legitimate political force with which they must reckon.
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