AfD Wins Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania With 38% as Merz's CDU Crashes Out of a State Parliament for the First Time

The far-right Alternative for Germany won its second German state election this month on Sunday, taking about 38% of the vote in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania — and dealing Chancellor Friedrich Merz's Christian Democratic Union a defeat with no precedent: 4.9%, below the 5% threshold, the first time in postwar history the CDU has failed to win seats in any German state parliament.

The preliminary results, released by the state's election commission early Monday, were brutal in their precision. The AfD finished on 38.2%, up 21.5 percentage points from 2021. The governing Social Democrats took 35.5%, down 4.1 points. The CDU collapsed to 4.9% from 13.3% five years ago — an 8.4-point fall that leaves the party with zero seats in the 71-member Schwerin parliament. The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance missed the threshold as well, at 4.8%.

For the CDU, the number that matters is not just 4.9% but what it erases. The party has contested every state election since the Federal Republic's founding in 1949; it had never once failed to clear a state parliament's threshold. Sunday was also the CDU's worst state result since 1949, full stop. In a single evening, the party of Adenauer, Kohl and Merkel became a non-entity in an entire German state — outpolled in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania even by the Left at 6.5% and the Greens at 5.7%.

Berlin delivered its own verdict the same day, and the loser was the same. Die Linke — the Left — topped the poll for the first time ever with 25.7% in preliminary results, running on housing nationalization and rent caps. The CDU fell to 18.8%, down 9.5 points; the AfD rose to 16.3%, up 7.2; the Greens took 14.3% and the SPD 12.1%, down 6.3. Stand-in CDU lead candidate Stefan Evers lost even his own constituency to an AfD candidate. If the result is confirmed, Linke lead candidate Elif Eralp would become Berlin's first leader of Turkish origin.

The capital's CDU had been governing in coalition with the SPD; that majority is gone. Mayor Kai Wegner withdrew as lead candidate in July after being caught lying about his whereabouts during the New Year's power outages that left 100,000 Berliners without electricity, leaving Evers to run what Merz called a “respectable result” — respectable enough to lose his own southeastern constituency. Eralp framed her party's triumph as a values verdict: “In our city, love and justice have triumphed over hatred.”

“We cannot sugarcoat the result in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern,” Merz said Sunday night at CDU headquarters in Berlin. “It is a disaster. The CDU fought hard, but in the end it was the CDU that got crushed in the polarisation between the Social Democratic Party and the AfD.” Merz vowed to stay and push ahead with his reform agenda — “The reforms must come,” he said — calling his program “the antidote to the poison of authoritarianism” and promising “backbone, steadfastness, and patience.” He had already called the AfD's near-44% win in Saxony-Anhalt two weeks earlier a “watershed.”

Merz's spin was that the year of state elections had not been all bad: back in March, his CDU had gained substantially in Baden-Württemberg even while losing to the Greens, and had won outright in Rhineland-Palatinate, returning to power after 35 years in opposition. But the eastern map tells a different story. Between Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the AfD has now taken the two strongest far-right showings in postwar eastern Germany within a fortnight — and Merz's own verdict on the trend was already on the record: trust in the country's institutions “is waning and is being actively undermined by radical parties on both the left and the right.”

The AfD smelled blood. Co-leader Tino Chrupalla called on Merz to resign, telling ZDF the chancellor's statement “was more than feeble — he announced that he'd carry on as before, instead of finally drawing the consequences and resigning.” Co-leader Alice Weidel said the AfD had “displaced the CDU as the people's party,” and added that she believed “the CDU cannot continue with Friedrich Merz, with a weak chancellor.”

The AfD will almost certainly be shut out of government anyway. Every other party maintains the cordon sanitaire — the firewall of non-cooperation with the far right — and the arithmetic favors the left: the AfD holds 32 seats to the SPD's 29, with the Left and Greens on five each, so a three-way SPD–Left–Greens coalition would govern. SPD premier Manuela Schwesig, who stayed in office despite finishing second, said voter opposition to Berlin's Ukraine policy — “both financial and military” — was among the forces that decided the vote.

It was the AfD's second first-place finish at state level this month, and the third time the party has been the strongest force in a regional vote. Nationally the AfD leads the opinion polls — kept from power only because the other parties refuse to work with it. The drivers are familiar: migration, living costs, a weak economy, and Merz's unpopular pension, tax and healthcare reforms. Sunday's vote was also the first Berlin state election in which 16- and 17-year-olds could vote.

For investors, the firewall is the whole trade. A first-place AfD finish converts into 32 opposition seats, not a government, and the DAX's 0.76% Monday gain priced exactly that: political theater, not regime change. The slower-burning signal is a chancellor weakened at home, with less room to advance the tax, healthcare and pension reforms at the heart of his agenda — German political risk now travels through federal polling rather than state parliaments.

Three things to watch. First, the CDU itself: whether “disaster” stays a Sunday-night word or becomes a leadership question — some in the party have reportedly called a sub-5% result potentially fatal for Merz's career. Second, Berlin's coalition math, where the Left must now assemble a government from a fractured parliament. Third, the AfD's national poll lead, which keeps growing precisely because the firewall guarantees its votes never cost it the compromises of governing.