Merz Vows to Hold German Coalition Together After Two State Defeats
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said on Monday, 21 September, he will hold his ruling coalition together for Germany's "democratic future" after defeats in two state elections.
He spoke at a news conference on Monday. His government is a coalition between the CDU and the SPD, meaning the two parties govern together. Merz said "We are determined to live up to the historic challenges our country is facing" and promised to press ahead with reforms, according to BBC and Reuters.
The two votes took place on Sunday. In Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the AfD won the most votes. The CDU did not reach the threshold, the minimum share needed to enter the state parliament. In Berlin, the CDU finished second to Die Linke. The AfD made large gains there.
Merz called the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern result "a heavy blow." He said "This election is a profound turning point. It is a dramatic, unprecedented result for the CDU in Germany." The result meant exclusion from that legislature, not only a lower vote share.
Sunday's votes came a fortnight after the CDU saw its vote halved in Saxony-Anhalt, where the AfD won. In that election, the AfD took 44% of the vote, according to Reuters. The party still fell short of an overall majority in the state legislature. Merz had said that win shook his CDU party to its foundations. In September 2026, national opinion polls put support for the AfD at between 27% and 29%.
Merz rejected the argument that his own low popularity explained the latest defeats. He said "The reasons for these election results go far beyond my own person." AfD co-leader Alice Weidel offered a different assessment. She said of Merz: "Pretty soon, he's going to leave."
On 15 July, Merz had said he did not want the U.S. government to interfere in German state elections in September. That comment came before a sequence of three votes in the east and the capital region that changed the parliamentary seats available to the centre-right and centre-left.
The broader context here is governability, not only party standing. A chancellor whose party cannot clear the bar for representation in one Land, a German state, finishes second in the capital, and has already lost first place in a third cannot rely on normal alternation between coalition partners at state level. Reform promises become harder to pass. Every Land negotiation narrows.
Looking at what this means for Berlin, the question is whether persistence holds. Merz has framed staying on as responsibility rather than choice. Weidel has framed his departure as near. Neither formulation settles the mechanics ahead: budget discipline, coalition discipline between CDU and SPD, and opposition pressure from both AfD and Die Linke. The signal to watch is whether the reform agenda advances while the federal coalition absorbs repeated regional losses.
