Friedrich Merz, Chancellor of Germany and head of the ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU) thought he was in for a rough ride in Sunday's regional elections. Neither the Baltic state of Mecklenburg-Pomerania nor the city contest in Berlin was polling his way, and Merz had tried his best to be proactively bold, especially coming off the disaster in Saxony-Anhalt two weeks ago.
Based on exit polling, since final results weren't in when I went to bed last night, Merz's party was being blown out of the water in historic fashion in both areas, and the chancellor himself was already calling it a disaster.
...“We can’t sugarcoat it, it was a disaster,” Merz told reporters in Berlin in a statement earlier directly after exit polls were released, breaking with a past practice for chancellors to speak the day after an election. He gathered senior CDU officials to party headquarters, where he sought to gauge their support for his leadership.
German blogger eugyppius was calling it the 'Merzpocalypse.'
Polls have closed in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Berlin, and the results are worse than expected for our floundering Chancellor, Friedrich Merz. The CDU has been bested by Die Linke (the Left Party) in Berlin, and still worse their showing in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is so bad it’s unclear they’ll make it into the Landtag at all.
...These are mere prognoses and they’ll fluctuate slightly as the counting continues through tonight, but they’ll generally be accurate to within one or two points. We won’t know until late tonight whether the CDU in a historical first has failed to cross the 5% hurdle for representation in a state parliament, but as of now we can be certain that they logged their worst result in any election in the history of the Federal Republic, underperforming their heretofore worst performance in the Bremen 1951 election.
Merz's CDU was teetering on the edge of annihilation in Mecklenburg-Pomerania, as anything less than a 5% showing means a party does not gain a seat in the Landtag, the regional parliament.
By this morning, the unthinkable had happened. The CDU had dropped below 5%, and there weren't enough votes left in the outstanding ballots yet to be counted to pull them back up over the threshold for representation.
It is a historical shellacking.
UPDATE II: The CDU is going to fall hundreds of votes short of the 5% cutoff for representation in the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Landtag. About 40 districts remain to be counted as I type this, and short of a miracle there aren’t enough votes left in the uncounted ballots for the Union to make it from 4.84% (where they’re at presently) to 5% or higher. This has never happened before in the history of the Federal Republic and it may well spell the end of Friedrich Merz’s chancellorship. In some ways the destruction of the Union in MV is more significant even than the historic AfD victory in Sachsen-Anhalt on 6 September.
With control of the Landtag at stake, the ruling Social Democratic Party (SPD), under the iron-fisted leadership of Minister President Manuela Schwesig since 2017, went up against a surging Alternativ for Germany (AfD) Party...and lost.
🚨HOLY SMOKES! 🇩🇪 Germany’s RIGHT-WING party [AfD] is heading for its SECOND consecutive VICTORY in a regional election! 🤯
— JackTheRippler ©️ (@RippleXrpie) September 20, 2026
In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the AfD party is projected to secure approximately 37% of the vote, while the Social Democrats are projected to receive… pic.twitter.com/VXV0snT90A
...In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the AfD party is projected to secure approximately 37% of the vote, while the Social Democrats are projected to receive around 35.5%.
Merz called the CDU’s outcome in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania a CATASTROPHE.
In fact, Alice Weidel's AfD would post a winning percentage of 38.3% over Schwesig's SPD 35.4%.
🇩🇪 Merz’s party has suffered a crushing defeat
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) September 20, 2026
For the first time in its history, the CDU is failing to enter a German state parliament. Latest figures from the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Landtag election put the party below 5%, out of the regional assembly.
It is the CDU’s worst… pic.twitter.com/lhl4yP8MEb
It is the CDU’s worst result ever in a state vote.
First place is held firmly by the AfD (38.3%).
CDU leader and Chancellor Friedrich Merz has already called the result in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern a “catastrophe.” He does not plan to resign over it.
But this is Germany, where its parliamentary high jinks were immediately on display, as the second-place SPD announced they would not be working with the winning party. Instead, they would form a government with Die Linke (6.5%), the party with the direct East German communist antecedents, and the Greens (5.7%).
Once again, the losers circle the wagons to cut the winners out of government completely.
...But the AfD faced stiff competition from the long-dominant Social Democrats, blunting to some extent the far-right’s upper trajectory. The SPD fell short of the AfD, but was still in position to form a new coalition with other parties. In Saxony-Anhalt, in contrast, the far right won almost 44% and aims to secure enough votes to install a state premier next month.
Manuela Schwesig, the popular premier of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, said she had the backing of a majority of voters in the Baltic coast state who opposed the far right.
“The AfD had planned to win an absolute majority here and form a single-party government,” Schwesig told ARD. “And yes, I was ‘the woman against blue’ to prevent that — and we succeeded,” she added, referring to the color associated with the AfD.
One of the day's saddest headlines perfectly illustrates the parliamentary way of doing things.
AfD makes gains in elections but has no government option
The Alternative for Germany (AfD) made significant gains in the elections in northeastern Germany and in the capital, Berlin, but is likely to remain in the opposition in both states.
The Alternative for Germany (AfD) scored another election victory on Sunday evening, becoming the strongest party in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania with 37.9% of the vote, according to an exit poll by the polling firm infratest-dimap on election night.
The AfD can find no one willing to work with them. So 'winning' basically means nothing.
Berlin, which has been under CDU control since 2023, will now be governed by a coalition that looks surprisingly retro, in that the communist party, Die Linke (The Left), has taken the day, with the CDU falling to second place and the AfD making a surprising leap into third.
...In Berlin, Merz’s party, which has governed the German capital since 2023, trailed the Left party. The Left, which advocates the expropriation of portfolios of large realestate companies, won 25.7% support, while the CDU secured 18.8%, an ARD projection showed.
It could shortly be total chaos in the housing market in Berlin.
...In the capital Berlin, the Left Party made the city's housing shortage the focus of its campaign, pledging to build new, affordable homes as well as forcibly reduce rents on properties that are 20% or more above the local average. They also vowed to curb holiday rentals, another factor that impacts housing availability and affordability.
Preliminary data suggests the Left Party gained some 36,000 voters in Berlin at the expense of the center-left Social Democratic Party, as well as 51,000 voters at the expense of the Greens.
And as with Mamdani's win in New York, Die Linke's victory was driven almost exclusively by young voters and women coming out for the communist/socialist parties.
This is how people under the age of 25 voted in the Berlin regional election tonight.
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) September 20, 2026
71% of women under 25 voted for the far-left, the left or the Greens.
51% of women under 25 voted for the party that is the direct, legal and organizational successor to communist party that… pic.twitter.com/841CWHYncm
...71% of women under 25 voted for the far-left, the left or the Greens.
51% of women under 25 voted for the party that is the direct, legal and organizational successor to communist party that ruled East Germany as a dictatorship between 1949 to 1989.
There's an explanation for that, too, besides the swooning for bad boys we see here.
Germans wonder how young people , especially women , could vote majority communist in Berlin.
— Jo Bhakdi (@JOBhakdi) September 21, 2026
They wonder what went wrong : do they not have a dad ? Don’t they think? Don’t they have loyalty to their country?
But those who ask these questions picture the wrong “young women” in… https://t.co/gYFjoTdhNR
... the wrong “young women” in their mind.
Yes, they have a dad. Yes, they are deeply loyal to their country. But neither their dad nor their country are German.
Young people with a migration background make up nearly 50% of all children and teenagers living in Berlin.
The new version of the communist parties in Sweden and Germany are not delusional white female liberals. They are clan-connected invasion machines.
They are not dumb, they are not naive, they are not pampered.
They are brutal, determined and ready to plunder.
And if you were a young woman in that crowd, you also would vote communist. Because you want to live.
What was remarkable was AfD's performance in that left-wing bastion. You would think they would have been crushed, but they apparently more than doubled their previous numbers.
It was a seismic event, and now everything depends on what happens with the resulting waves rippling out.
AfD's Weidel says the CDU will never win another federal election.
...The co-chair of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, Alice Weidel, said on Monday that her party's recent electoral successes signaled the end of Chancellor Friedrich Merz's conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
"It is clear that we have replaced the CDU as the people's party," she said, referring in particular to the party's "gigantic, brilliant" victory in the northeastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, where the CDU failed to reach the minimum 5% threshold to even enter the state parliament.
"This was a clear punishment of the CDU, Merz and their left-wing politics," she claimed, adding that the CDU's defeat was a "result of their unintelligent firewall politics" – a reference to the refusal of democratic parties to enter into coalitions with the AfD.
Indeed, despite emerging as the largest party in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania with 38% of the vote, the most realistic coalition is likely to be between the Social Democrats (35%), the socialist Left Party (7%) and the Greens (6%).
Looking ahead to future federal elections, Weidel predicted: "The CDU will fall towards 5%. It will never win a federal election again."
Merz will try to hang on any way he can. He's wanted this job his entire life...
...On the federal level, pressure had been mounting on German Chancellor Friedrich Merz to resign, a notion he has so far rejected.
The AfD has been spearheading the campaign since it topped the results in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt two weeks ago. That has been compounded after his conservative Christian Democratic Union party failed to clear the 5% threshold to enter parliament in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.
Merz held a pre-planned CDU crisis meeting straight after the vote on Sunday, and has cleared his schedule this week, announcing he will skip the UN General Assembly to deal with the aftermath of the elections.
While his Sunday speech signalled he did not intend to step down, rumours that his conservative bloc might oust him have continued to circulate, with his approval ratings hovering barely above 10%.
...but after a 1-2 punch to the head like the party's just taken, bravado might be all he has going for him because he's running short of friends.
...The fallout has dealt a blow to Merz’s chancellorship, prompting calls among rank-and-file members to push Merz — who polls show is the least popular postwar German chancellor — out after only 16 months in office.
Eight CDU premiers last week sought to defuse any standoff with a declaration that they stood behind the chancellor, but many party officials are convinced that his stewardship can only do more harm. Whether he remains in power for now, his departure may come sooner rather than later, people within the party have said.
“All in all, another reminder of an increasingly fragmented political landscape: A win for a right-wing populist party in one state, a win for a left-wing populist party in the other,” Carsten Brzeski, ING Research’s global head of macro, said in a report. “Years of economic stagnation helped produce that fragmentation. Now the fragmentation will make the stagnation harder to escape.”
All observers are saying the next 48 hours will determine Merz's fate.
THE CDU IS OFTEN THE PARTY OF POWER - AT THE MOMENT, IT IS A PARTY IN DECLINE
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has described a state election result as a "disaster", with the results for the CDU being the worst in post-war history.@AliBunkallSKY analyses the changing political climate in Germany, with the rise of the AfD.https://t.co/rgd90a8VX3 pic.twitter.com/W1Zo0zz6pj
— Sky News (@SkyNews) September 21, 2026
This next forty-eight hours is going to seem longer than the sixteen months he's been in office, guaranteed.
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