Stuttgart, Germany – Minutes after the results of the first exit polls flashed across German screens, Chancellor Friedrich Merz of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) declared in a televised statement at the party’s headquarters that he was going nowhere. I will muster them – as party chairman of the CDU and, above all, as chancellor of our country.” On Thursday, a survey by Germany’s public broadcaster ARD found that only one in 10 respondents were satisfied or very satisfied with his work. That is the lowest figure for any chancellor since the survey began in 1997.
His party crashed out of the state parliament in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, failing to clear the 5 percent threshold needed to win seats – the first time this has happened since the Federal Republic of Germany 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 came second after The Left party, which won 25.7 percent of the vote. The Left now hopes to form a government in the capital although it will need coalition partners. Just two weeks earlier, the CDU suffered another blow.
The AfD won the state elections in Saxony-Anhalt, receiving more than 40 percent of the vote, compared with 17 percent for the CDU. Merz could face a revolt within his own party, but removing him as chancellor would be considerably harder. Under Germany’s Constitution, the Bundestag can replace a chancellor only by simultaneously electing a successor with an absolute majority.
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.” A former chairman of the BlackRock investment company’s German supervisory board, Merz had long harboured ambitions of becoming chancellor but was sidelined by then-Chancellor and -CDU leader Angela Merkel in the early 2000s. He staged an unexpected comeback, finally taking office in May 2025.
At the helm, Merz has drawn criticism for remarks about the country’s “Stadtbild” (cityscape), widely interpreted as a suggestion that there were too many refugees and migrants on the streets. The debate has resurfaced in recent days with prominent CDU figures returning to the issue after the party’s poor election results. The AfD’s surge is but one factor behind the decline of Germany’s long-dominant conservative party, which has produced six chancellors in its history.
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