German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said on Monday he intends to hold his coalition of the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) together after his party’s defeats in Sunday’s state elections, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP), The Guardian and The Hindu.

The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) came first in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, where the CDU crashed out of the state parliament with its worst result since the party’s founding in 1945; in Berlin, the hard-left Die Linke pushed the CDU into second place. Merz called the result a “heavy blow” and a “profound turning point”, ruled out resigning and said the reasons for the setback “go far beyond my own person”. The SPD also said it would stay in the coalition while signalling it would push for changes to the government’s planned reforms.