CDU defeat: it loses Berlin and could be left out of the Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania parliament
The post-communists prevail in the German capital and the extreme right wins in a new eastern state
BarcelonaGermany's Grand Coalition is left shaken after this weekend's elections in the states of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Berlin. Both the CDU and the SPD have suffered significant electoral setbacks, in elections that leave two clear winners: the far-right and the post-communist left. In Mecklenburg, Alternative for Germany has overtaken the Social Democrats, who have been governing since 2017 and with whom the far-right had been maintaining a neck-and-neck battle in the polls. Nevertheless, the Social Democratic candidate Manuela Schwesig will be able to continue governing as the far-right has no way of achieving a majority. The German chancellor's party, on the other hand, obtained its worst result in history in this state and, as of now, would remain out of the regional parliament, aggravating the internal crisis in the party. In Berlin, the CDU has been unseated by The Left (Die Linke), which wins an election for the first time with one in every four votes.
The defeat of the CDU in the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania is especially serious. Friedrich Merz's party is struggling during the count to manage to keep deputies in the regional Parliament. With the scrutiny quite advanced, it remains out of the chamber by obtaining 4.9% of the support, below the 5% minimum threshold established by law to obtain representation. Proof of the gravity of the result for the CDU is that Merz himself reacted quickly when the poll became known: “We cannot sugarcoat the result in Mecklenburg. It is a disaster –he declared from the party's headquarters in Berlin–. The CDU has fought, but it has been crushed in the confrontation between the SPD and the AfD", he asserted.
However, Merz has refused to resign and has promised to work to reverse the CDU's defeat at the polls, which worsens with each electoral call. Merz's recipe to make his party resurface consists, as he has maintained in recent weeks, of promoting reforms at a federal level. "I assume this responsibility, because I want to move our country forward –he remarked this Sunday–. What needs to be done now requires firmness and patience. I will provide it as president of the party and, above all, as chancellor", he added.
Be that as it may, the setback for the CDU is twofold. In Berlin, where it had previously governed hand in hand with the SPD, the Left's candidate, Elif Eralp, has prevailed over both the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats. It is the first time that the post-communists, the party furthest to the left on the German institutional political board, have won the elections. It is also the first time that the party has surpassed the SPD, which also falls behind the Greens. Although the radical left has been part of the city-state's government in previous legislatures, hand in hand with the Social Democrats and the Greens, the mayoralty has always fallen to the CDU or the SPD.
Merz considers the result in Berlin to be "decent", since the CDU has gathered just under 20% of the votes and, although it is left with practically no options to govern, it has been able to stay almost four points ahead of the far right, while losing almost 10 percentage points of support. Even so, the ultra-right also improves its results considerably, going from obtaining 9% of the votes to obtaining 16%.
The AfD pressures the CDU
After the overwhelming victory, in early September, of the far-right in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, where the AfD fell three seats short of an absolute majority, this Sunday's elections were read as a litmus test for Friedrich Merz's government. With the CDU recording its worst result in history in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the outlook does not improve for the general elections, which are scheduled for 2029. The latest polls point to a decline for the conservatives to 20% of the vote, seven points below the AfD, which is leading the polls.
In the Christian Democrat ranks, alarm bells have been ringing for months, and the disastrous results in the latest trips to the polls have led to a debate within the party about what needs to be done for the future. Among the conservatives, voices have emerged that are beginning to see the strategy of the cordon sanitaire against the far-right as exhausted, a particularly sensitive issue in the country due to its Nazi past.
In this sense, the leader of the AfD, Alice Weidel, has once again pressured the CDU to agree to form an alliance with her party. Weidel has directly linked the CDU's latest electoral setbacks to the cordon sanitaire it maintains with the far-right party, and has demanded that Merz's party agree to negotiate "as soon as possible".
The results and the polarization of the German political spectrum also put the Grand Coalition led by Merz on the ropes. The two partners, the CDU and the SPD, often clash when it comes to proposing economic or social measures, and the shift of the electorate towards the far-right and the radical left makes the sometimes opposite directions in which the social democrats and conservatives are moving increasingly evident.