Merz Vows to Stay After CDU Losses in Two German States

Friedrich Merz said on 20 September he will stay on as German chancellor after exit polls pointed to defeats for his CDU in Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.

Polls closed at 18:00 local time (17:00 BST). Merz had invited the entire CDU executive to gather formally at 5:00 p.m. (1500 GMT) to follow the results, a break from practice in previous state elections.

In Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in the northeast, the AfD was projected to win the most votes with 38% in the ZDF projection reported by the BBC. The CDU was projected to only just enter the state parliament. Merz called the result there "a disaster".

In Berlin, where the CDU leads the state government, the party was projected to be beaten by Die Linke. The ZDF projection at poll close put Die Linke at nearly 26% and the CDU at 20%, according to the BBC.

In Schwerin, the capital of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, parties need 5% of the vote to stay in the state parliament, a rule noted by DW. Pre-election polling had put the CDU at 6%, close to exclusion, according to Al Jazeera. The party had been expected to suffer its worst-ever result in the state, as reported by Reuters.

Other parties in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern say they will not form a coalition, a governing partnership, with the AfD.

The two votes came a fortnight after the AfD won in Saxony-Anhalt, where the CDU vote was halved. Merz had held the chancellery for 16 months at the time of the Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern elections. He had campaigned in the east ahead of the ballots with the message "Wir müssen das Gute zeigen." Earlier in the week, leaders of eight German states backed him publicly.

The broader context here is governability rather than vote share alone. A first-place finish without willing partners leaves the AfD strong in votes but blocked in the Landtag, the state parliament. That forces the other parties into more complex talks to build a majority among themselves. For the CDU, the problem cuts two ways: near-ejection from one eastern parliament and loss of the leading role in the capital it now runs.

Looking at what this means for Berlin at the national level, a chancellor who rules out resignation shifts attention to party management. Endorsement by eight state leaders before polling day gave Merz a buffer. The question now is whether that buffer holds through coalition negotiations in Schwerin and Berlin, and as Saxony-Anhalt, Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern are read as a pattern rather than separate setbacks. Exit polls are not final counts. But the political signal, including in Merz's own language, is already set.