Germany's far right has won a state election outright for the second time in a fortnight, and this time it took the chancellor's own party out of a parliament with it. On preliminary results from the state returning officer, the Alternative für Deutschland won 38.2% in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern on Sunday, ahead of Manuela Schwesig's SPD on 35.5%. Friedrich Merz's CDU took 4.9% — below the five-per-cent threshold and out of the Landtag for the first time in the party's history. In Berlin, Die Linke won the city-state with 25.7%, pushing the CDU into second place on 18.8%, with the AfD on 16.3%, the Greens on 14.3% and the SPD on 12.1%.
Mecklenburg-Vorpommern was Angela Merkel's home state. Five years ago the CDU took 13% there. The collapse to 4.9% is the party's worst result in any state election in post-war Germany, and it leaves the new Landtag in Schwerin with 32 AfD seats against 29 for the SPD, five each for the Left and the Greens. The BSW fell just short on 4.8%. The likeliest government is a three-way SPD–Left–Green coalition — which means the state's second-largest party, one that campaigned openly against Berlin's reform course and has never fully cleared up its own Russia entanglements, would govern with the far-left.
Across the two weekends the CDU shed roughly 20 points in Saxony-Anhalt, eight in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and ten in Berlin. Polling analysis by Infratest dimap found that both winners — the AfD in the north-east and the Left in the capital — drew most of their new voters not from rival parties but from people who had not voted before. Turnout rose sharply. The price of that mobilisation, as one German commentator put it, is a destabilised party system: in neither state is there now a majority for a politics of the centre.
The Berlin result carries its own complications. The Left's lead candidate Elif Eralp ran on expropriating large landlords, and the party has an unresolved relationship with antisemitic currents in its own ranks. A Left–Green–SPD coalition would have a clear majority; a CDU–Green–SPD arrangement is arithmetically possible but politically improbable after Sunday.
The chancellor did something unusual for a state election: he gave a televised statement on the night. "This is a disaster," Merz said of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. He then declared Germany's 2026 election year over and announced that nothing would change. "The reforms must come," he said, describing them as "the antidote to the authoritarian poison" penetrating German society. "What needs to be done requires backbone, steadfastness and patience."
By Monday the tone had shifted. After a crunch meeting of the CDU leadership, Merz said his party had been "crushed" and that "we no longer have answers to too many questions". He promised a review of the party's organisation, programme and political profile, and noted that more than 40% of Berlin voters had backed what he called "destructive" forces. He insisted nobody in the closed-door session had raised a change of personnel, and that he had the backing to govern on. He also picked a fight with his coalition partner, singling out Manuela Schwesig for a divisive campaign in Schwerin. The SPD leadership showed no sign of pulling the plug: co-leader Lars Klingbeil stressed the party's "responsibility" to govern, even as the SPD demanded a rethink of agreed reforms to pensions, care and health.
The more telling signal was on policy. Merz — the least popular chancellor in the near-thirty-year history of the ARD DeutschlandTrend — used Monday's appearance to call Germany's two-tier health insurance system a "problem of fairness" that "we must change", a line his own spokesperson was softening within two hours. Bavaria's Markus Söder wants a "fairness check" on all future legislation; Hesse's Boris Rhein wants state intervention on fuel prices. The cabinet approved a 17-cent cut in fuel duty the same day. German business commentators drew the obvious conclusion: the first casualty of the panic after the far right's surge is the reform agenda Merz says is the cure. That comes as tens of thousands of car workers protested at some 200 sites against job cuts at Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Audi and their suppliers, days after VW cut its profit forecast on a €6 billion Porsche writedown — and, in a twist, as Germany's leading economic institutes prepared to lift their 2026 growth forecast from 0.6% to 1.3%.
The EU's next long-term budget, for 2028 to 2034, must be agreed by the end of this year. Until now the urgency came from Paris: capitals wanted the deal locked before France's presidential election next spring and the possibility of a Marine Le Pen victory. Attention is shifting east. Germany is the bloc's largest net contributor, and Merz already led the six-country frugal camp demanding "several hundred billion euros" of cuts from the Commission's proposed €2 trillion plan — positions running to 20% below the Commission's opening numbers.
The fear in Brussels is not that Merz turns hawkish. It is that he can no longer turn back. "He is now backed into a corner by the rise of the far right," one diplomat said. With the German economy stagnant since 2023 and the AfD polling ahead of the CDU nationally, no German chancellor can retreat from a demand to curb Berlin's payments into the EU pot. Diplomats say Germany has become more vocal in demanding cuts since the weekend, with five other countries behind it. Merz meets the minister-presidents of the Länder on Thursday to discuss the European budget; few expect a softening.
The Commission is pressing ahead regardless. On Monday it presented national governments with a first draft of guidelines for the national and regional partnership plans that would unlock money under the new single-fund structure — the structure MEPs oppose because it folds the Common Agricultural Policy into a national envelope. That the Council is already discussing implementation guidelines is an implicit admission that capitals treat the new architecture as settled, whatever Parliament thinks.
The calendar is now brutal. European affairs ministers met in Brussels on Tuesday for their final budget discussion before the Irish presidency circulates a revised "negotiating box" — Ireland's Europe minister Thomas Byrne wants it out well before ministers reconvene on 13 October. Three leaders' summits are pencilled in: 15 October, 13 November and 17 December, with a five-day marathon under António Costa a live option. If December fails, a Plan B emergency summit in late January or early February is already being discussed; if that fails too, the deal slips past spring 2027 and potentially into negotiations with a Le Pen-led Élysée. And even a deal in Brussels then needs the European Parliament's consent — a process that took five months in 2020, in a chamber far less fragmented than today's.
The weekend's result also sharpens a question that has moved from hypothetical to scheduled. AfD co-leader Alice Weidel has said that when her party enters government after the 2029 federal election, Germany will leave the euro and the Schengen area. A party at 38% in one state and 44% in another is no longer a fringe that can be banned away: the Oxford historian Timothy Garton Ash argued this weekend that a constitutional ban is now too late to be legitimate, and that the answer is to constrain the AfD legally — including the never-used Article 37 federal override — while fighting it politically with a positive programme rather than a firewall. Christian Democrats, he warned, should resist the temptation to get "half into bed" with a party whose own activists are warning against being "Melonised".
The immediate casualty is the EU's budget calendar. A chancellor who cannot afford to look soft on Brussels will not sign a €2 trillion framework before Christmas, and every month of delay pushes the negotiation closer to the French election that everyone wanted to avoid. The deeper problem is structural: Germany's political centre has stopped producing majorities, and the two parties now governing or about to govern in Schwerin and Berlin — one that wants out of the euro, one that wants to expropriate landlords — both define themselves against the European reform agenda that Merz says is the only cure. For the EU, the most reliable member state has just become the least predictable one.
