The Left Won Berlin, the AfD Won the North-East, and the CDU Fell Below Five Per Cent in a State for the First Time

The two results that Friedrich Merz stayed home from the United Nations to manage, as we reported last week, arrived on Sunday night and were worse than the polls. In Berlin, Die Linke, the party descended from East Germany's communists and rebuilt over the last two years around rents and the cost of living, won a state election for the first time anywhere, with 25.7 per cent. In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the thinly populated Baltic state that Angela Merkel represented for thirty years, the AfD came first with 38.2 per cent, the Social Democrats held on with 35.5, and the Christian Democratic Union took 4.9 per cent, below the threshold, and will have no seats in a German state parliament for the first time in the party's 81-year history.

Berlin

The Euronews count puts the CDU second on 18.8 per cent, the AfD third on 16.3, the Greens on 14.3 and the SPD, which governed the city for most of the period since reunification, on 12.1, its worst result in Berlin. The BSW scraped the threshold. The governing CDU and SPD coalition under Kai Wegner has lost its majority. Die Linke's lead candidate, Elif Eralp, a lawyer born in Berlin to Turkish parents, would be the city's first mayor from a migrant family if she can assemble a majority with the Greens and SPD, both of which have said they will talk, conditional in the SPD's case on the Left's handling of antisemitism within its ranks. "In our city, love and justice have triumphed over hatred," Eralp told supporters. Berlin has not had a government led by the Left since 1990, and the coalition arithmetic will take weeks.

Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania

The AfD's Leif-Erik Holm came first but not close to a majority, with 32 of 71 seats. Manuela Schwesig's SPD, on 29, can stay in office with the Left on five and the Greens on five, which is the most likely outcome and one that leaves the state governed by a party that finished second. The CDU's result is the one that will be studied. It was squeezed, in Merz's own word, between a Social Democrat premier who ran as the anti-AfD candidate and an AfD that has absorbed almost the entire conservative vote in the east. Al Jazeera notes that broadcasters NDR and n-tv could find no precedent for the CDU missing a state threshold.

Merz

The chancellor called the north-eastern result "a disaster" on Sunday night and then said what the eight premiers had signed a statement to say last week: that he is staying. "What needs to be done now requires backbone, steadfastness, and patience. The reforms have to come." His approval is 14 per cent. The AfD's co-leader Tino Chrupalla called the statement "more than feeble". The party's own meeting on Sunday morning, called to demonstrate unity, did so; what happens at the next one depends on whether any faction of the CDU thinks a different chancellor would win back the east, and no name has emerged. The mechanics have not changed since we set them out: a constructive vote of no confidence needs a successor the SPD will accept, and the SPD has no reason to give the CDU a fresh start.

The larger picture

Three eastern states have now voted this month and the AfD has won two of them outright and doubled its vote in the third. Reuters reported on Monday that Kirill Dmitriev, Vladimir Putin's economic envoy, is preparing meetings with the AfD leadership in 2027 to discuss restarting Russian gas supplies, which tells you what the party's rise looks like from Moscow. In Berlin, a city of 3.8 million, the winning issue was rent. In the north-east it was everything the CDU has failed to fix in sixteen months of federal government, and the voters gave the answer to the party that has never governed. The federal election is not due until 2029. The question in the CDU is whether Merz can be the candidate, and Sunday made it louder without answering it.