The CDU was shut out of a parliament for the first time, and the Left took Berlin
The last two state elections of the year gave the AfD its second state in two weeks, kept the CDU out of a state parliament for the first time and put the Left in charge of the capital. Friedrich Merz’s government lost at both ends on the same night, and the party that held the Federal Republic together for eighty-one years is the one being hollowed out.
Germany’s September election calendar ended with two ballots on the same night, and the preliminary results point in opposite directions: in the northeast, the AfD (Alternative for Germany) won the state election in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania with 38.2% of the vote, following up its 6 September success in Saxony-Anhalt, according to Reuters; in the capital, the Left (Die Linke) took first place for the first time, with 25.7%, according to the preliminary result released by the electoral authority and reported by tagesschau and MDR.
What the two elections share is the size of the loser. In both, the parties that sustain Friedrich Merz’s federal government came out smaller than they went in, and the country Europe expects to help finance its own defence enters the autumn with a narrower electoral base than it had the day before.
The east without the CDU
In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the CDU took 4.9% of the vote and failed to enter the state parliament, below the 5% threshold. According to AP, it is the party’s worst result in a state election in its 81-year history; in 2021 it had taken 13.3%. The AfD came first with 38.2%, and the SPD of state premier Manuela Schwesig second with 35.5%, overtaken for the first time since 1994. The Left took 6.5%, the Greens 5.7%, the BSW 4.8% and the FDP 1.0%, with turnout at 78.1%, according to NDR.
Figures from the pollster infratest dimap cited by NDR show how the votes moved: the SPD lost around 47,000 voters to the AfD and gained 25,000 from the former CDU pool. Among those who voted SPD, 49% said they would not have done so without Schwesig.
The post-election arithmetic is where the night gets hardest for Germany’s party system. The three parties that refuse to govern with the AfD — the SPD, the Left and the Greens — add up to 47.7% of the vote, less than half. MDR reports that Schwesig could keep governing and that, unlike what took shape in Saxony-Anhalt, no path to power is open to the AfD in the state. The party’s candidate, Leif-Erik Holm, claimed the right to form a government and told ARD it would “naturally also talk to all the other parties”.
The CDU has built its recent identity around refusing any deal with the far right, the wall the German press calls the Brandmauer. In Mecklenburg, the party that gave that wall its name is not in parliament to defend it.
The CDU spent eighty-one years as the party that guaranteed majorities. In Mecklenburg, it left the parliament where those majorities were formed.
The capital turned left
In Berlin, the Left doubled its 2023 result, from 12.2% to 25.7%, its best performance in the city’s history, according to tagesschau. The CDU fell from 28.2% to 18.8% and the SPD, which governed with it, from 18.4% to 12.1%, the Social Democrats’ worst result in the capital. The AfD rose from 9.1% to 16.3%, its best result in Berlin, and the Greens took 14.3%. The BSW finished on 4.7% and stayed out. The CDU-SPD coalition at the Rotes Rathaus lost its majority, and the most likely scenario, according to MDR, is a Left-led government with the SPD and the Greens. Turnout was 75.0%.
One election gave the far right first place in the east; the other handed the capital to the left. The same federal government answers for both, and it is the one that comes out smaller in both counts.
The government that lost all three
Merz called the result a “disaster” and said he is staying on as chancellor and CDU leader, keeping to his reform course, according to MDR and AP. He appeared at party headquarters fifteen minutes after the first projections, a move Il Sole 24 Ore read as a sign that he intends to stay. Inside the CDU itself, the leader of the party’s caucus in Mecklenburg, Rehberg, blamed the defeat on “Berlin politics” and the chancellor’s lack of empathy, in remarks to Tagesspiegel cited by NDR.
In September, the CDU failed to win any of the three state elections on the calendar. The AfD, which claims the “party of the people” label in the words of co-leader Alice Weidel, cited by AFP, grew in the east; the Left, which had never been the strongest force in Berlin, grew in the capital. The two poles of the German party system advanced in opposite directions on the same night, and the centre through which the federal government breathes was squeezed in both places.
What Germany carries to Brussels
A Landtag does not move a line of the federal budget, and German foreign policy is not decided in Schwerin or on the Alexanderplatz. What the two ballots present is a bill of legitimacy: the government that would have to sustain in the Bundestag the rearmament, the defence financing and the continuation of support for Ukraine enters those votes with less political room than it had the day before, at a moment when room is precisely what Germany lacks.
Germany is the European Union’s largest economy and the country whose position usually defines what the bloc can offer in money and weapons. None of those decisions is scheduled for September, and none of them depends on a vote in Schwerin. All of them, however, run through a Bundestag elected in 2025 and a government that just lost all three of the month’s ballots.
A German state election is a mood test, not a foreign policy test: voters in Berlin and Schwerin cast ballots over schools, rent and transport, and the result says more about the wear on those in office than about the country’s place in the world. What Sunday measured is the willingness of that electorate to keep sustaining a government that is asking it for sacrifice.
That is where Sunday night leaves a question without a date. A party system that now has three poles without a majority — the radical right in the east, the left in the capital and a centre shrinking in both places — does not by itself decide what Germany will do in Ukraine, in Brussels or at NATO. It does decide how much time and political capital the government that signs those choices has to spend, and that is the variable no projection measures.