Merz's CDU wiped out in one German state, pushed to third in Berlin, as far right wins twice in three weeks

Chancellor Friedrich Merz's Christian Democrats failed to win a single seat in the state parliament of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and fell to third place in Berlin on Sunday, the party's worst showing in any German state election since it was founded in 1945 and the second time in three weeks that the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, has finished first in a state vote.

In Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, on Germany's northeastern coast, the AfD took 38.2 percent of the vote, according to the preliminary official result published by the state parliament, ahead of the Social Democrats at 35.5 percent. The CDU collapsed to 4.9 percent, below the 5 percent threshold required to win seats, and lost all 13 of the seats it held going into the election. It was the first time since the party's founding that the CDU has been shut out of a German state legislature entirely.

In Berlin, voting the same day, the CDU avoided a total wipeout but still slid to second place behind the Left party, which won 25.7 percent of the vote to become the strongest party in the capital for the first time in its history. The CDU took 18.8 percent, narrowly ahead of the AfD's 16.3 percent, which nearly doubled the far-right party's previous result in the city. The Greens polled 14.3 percent and the governing Social Democrats fell to 12.1 percent, their worst result in a Berlin state election on record.

A historic collapse in the northeast

Mecklenburg-Vorpommern's state election authority reported turnout of 78.1 percent, among the highest for a state election in years. Under the preliminary result, the AfD wins 32 of the new 71-seat Landtag's seats and the SPD 29, with the Left party and the Greens taking five seats apiece. Four parties will sit in the new parliament; the CDU and the pro-business Free Democrats, who took just 1.0 percent, are both excluded.

The result marks a near-total reversal from the CDU's 13 percent showing in the state's 2021 election. AfD state chairman Leif-Erik Holm, the party's lead candidate, said Sunday night that his party now held "the government mandate here" and expected other parties to be willing to negotiate, though Germany's mainstream parties have so far maintained a longstanding refusal to form coalitions with the AfD. SPD state premier Manuela Schwesig, whose party will almost certainly have to form a government without the CDU for the first time in years, turned her criticism on the chancellor rather than on the AfD.

"A federal chancellor who only has five percent approval in my federal state should ask himself self-critically what he may have done wrong so far," Schwesig said.

Berlin swings toward the Left

Berlin's result was less catastrophic for the CDU but still marked a sharp break with recent history. The Berlin state election authority announced the preliminary result at roughly 1:30 a.m. on September 21 after turnout of 74.2 percent. With the Left, Greens and SPD together holding 97 of the 162 seats in the new Abgeordnetenhaus, according to a seat count reported by Der Tagesspiegel, a left-wing coalition led by the Left's Elif Eralp has enough votes to govern and could make her Berlin's first-ever left-wing governing mayor, displacing the CDU-led administration that has run the city since 2023. A CDU-Greens-SPD alliance would fall short with 84 seats. The Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, a socially conservative left splinter party, took 4.7 percent and again missed the threshold for seats, as did the FDP at 2.5 percent.

Eralp, celebrating the result, told supporters the outcome showed voters in the capital "feel represented for the first time." The AfD's near-doubling of its Berlin vote share, even while finishing third, extended a pattern that has alarmed mainstream parties for more than a year: the party is gaining ground even in a traditionally left-leaning western city where it has never previously polled above single digits in a state election.

The AfD's second win in three weeks

Sunday's results followed an even larger shock on September 6, when the AfD won 43.8 percent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, according to the Saxony-Anhalt state election office's results portal, becoming the largest party in that state's Landtag with 39 of 83 seats while the CDU fell to just 15. Taken together, the three state elections held in September mean the AfD has now finished first or a close second in every vote held this month, and has outright won two of three.

The results land amid a sharp decline in support for Merz's 16-month-old government. National polling for the CDU/CSU bloc has fallen from roughly 30 percent in July 2025, shortly after Merz took office, to about 21 percent in September 2026, while the chancellor's own approval rating has dropped from a peak near 42 percent to about 13 percent over the same period, according to polling cited by Time. Unemployment has stayed above 3 million for much of the year; the Federal Employment Agency reported 3.061 million people out of work in August, a jobless rate of 6.5 percent, feeding voter frustration with the CDU-SPD coalition's economic record. Germany's domestic intelligence service classified the national AfD as a "confirmed right-wing extremist" organization in May 2025, a designation a Cologne administrative court has since provisionally barred the agency from repeating while a full legal challenge proceeds, though the mainstream parties' refusal to govern with the AfD has held regardless of that court fight.

Merz, appearing at a press conference in Berlin after the results, called the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern outcome "a disaster" but said he would remain in office and press ahead with an economic overhaul he has promised since taking power. "What needs to be done now requires backbone, steadfastness and patience," he said, adding that he accepted responsibility because he wanted to "advance this country" and describing his reform agenda as the antidote to what he called the "authoritarian poison" spreading through German society.

AfD co-leader Tino Chrupalla dismissed that response as "more than feeble" and said he expected Merz to "draw the consequences" and resign. Party co-chair Alice Weidel wrote on social media that the AfD had become Germany's "new Volkspartei," or people's party, pointing to "16 percent in Berlin, 38 percent and strongest force in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern" as evidence the party had supplanted the CDU in that role.

What happens next

Coalition talks in both states are expected to begin within days. In Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the SPD, Left and Greens hold a combined 39 of 71 seats, enough for a narrow governing majority that would keep the AfD, the largest single party, out of the state government — provided the three parties can agree on a program. In Berlin, negotiations are expected to center on whether the Left, Greens and SPD can translate their combined majority into a functioning coalition under Eralp, a scenario that would have been considered unlikely in German state politics as recently as five years ago, given the Left's history as a marginal, mostly eastern German party.

For Merz, the immediate pressure is less about losing power outright — his federal coalition with the SPD does not automatically depend on the outcome of either state vote — than about whether CDU lawmakers conclude his reform-first strategy is costing the party more than it is winning back. Reporting on the CDU's internal reaction has noted discussion of whether Merz should be replaced before the next national election, even as he insists he intends to complete his term. The mainstream parties' informal agreement to refuse any coalition with the AfD, credited with keeping the party from power so far despite its gains, faces its most direct test yet in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, where the AfD placed first for the first time and has already claimed a mandate to govern.