German chancellor Friedrich Merz pledged on Monday to overhaul his Christian Democratic Union (CDU) after Sunday’s historic state election defeat, acknowledging his own share of responsibility. ‘Federal politics played a major role, and so did I,’ he said, according to Le Monde, which describes the chancellor fighting for his political survival.

At a press conference in Berlin he called the result ‘dramatic and unprecedented’ because ‘an entire state parliamentary caucus has been eliminated from the state legislature’, and said the party ‘no longer has satisfactory answers to too many questions’, according to POLITICO. Merz said he would hold ‘intensive deliberations’ with the party leadership on its platform, structure and public image and claimed the full backing of the leadership; state premiers met in Berlin on Sunday night without the chancellor, according to German media reports cited by POLITICO.