Friedrich Merz has vowed to do all he can to stop the far-right Alternative for Germany taking power in Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday. In practice, that has meant staying largely out of sight.
On Monday, the first of the chancellor’s two campaign appearances in the eastern state involved no grand rally, no set-piece speech and no cheering supporters. Instead, he joined local officials for a closed-door discussion, then took a stroll through the gardens of the castle hosting the event.
The low-key visit, even as his Christian Democratic Union (CDU) is forecast to lose heavily to the AfD, reflects the German leader’s unpopularity. Saxony-Anhalt’s incumbent CDU premier, Sven Schulze, has kept Merz at arm’s length and has also clashed with the chancellor over federal plans to end early state retirement schemes.
“Merz is the number-one target” on the campaign trail, said Eva von Angern, the regional candidate for the hard-left Die Linke party. “He’s the reason everyone gives for why they no longer want to vote for the CDU, nor any of the established parties.”
This discontent extends far beyond Saxony-Anhalt, a former communist state with 2.1mn inhabitants. Just over a year after taking office, and with the AfD poised to make big gains in three regional elections this month, Merz’s record-low personal ratings are a drag on his own party nationwide.
The regional elections are piling pressure on Merz’s coalition with the Social Democrats, whose ratings are also languishing. The volatile mood is testing hopes in Europe that Germany can remain an anchor of stability ahead of elections next year in France, Italy, Poland and Spain, where far-right parties are polling strongly.
“Germany is traditionally regarded as fairly stable, but the situation is extremely fragile,” warned Andreas Rödder, history professor at Mainz University, and a CDU member.
In a Forsa survey published last month, 85 per cent of Germans said they were dissatisfied with the chancellor. Nationwide support for Merz’s CDU and its Bavarian sister, the CSU, has fallen to about 20-22 per cent from 28.5 per cent in the 2025 federal elections. Meanwhile, the AfD has overtaken the conservative bloc to become Germany’s most popular party, at 28 per cent.
Most Germans think Merz will not complete his four-year term, which runs until 2029, according to a YouGov survey. Nearly one in five think he will not survive the year.
“Growing dissatisfaction with him is not just damaging his party but also weakening trust in the entire political system,” said Forsa’s founder Manfred Güllner.
In Saxony-Anhalt, where the AfD is polling at more than 40 per cent, the party could make history on Sunday by winning an outright majority.
Such a result would signal the failure of Merz’s “firewall” strategy of ostracising the far right, said Christian Stecker, a political scientist at TU Darmstadt.
If the AfD falls short of a majority, the CDU would face fraught talks over forming a regional government. Having ruled out the Die Linke party, the conservatives could be left leading a minority administration reliant on support from anti-capitalist lawmakers — anathema to many in Merz’s party.
The alternative may be worse: refusing to work with the left could leave the CDU dependent on AfD votes to pass legislation, prompting senior figures to break ranks.
Stecker says such a scenario could be “the tipping point” at which the CDU splits and Merz’s position becomes untenable.
“All scenarios are insanely difficult,” said Rödder. “It will shake the CDU.”
Pollsters point to several reasons for the deep dissatisfaction with Merz. One is a communication style that can come across as arrogant, even callous — as when he expressed irritation during a town hall with a terminally ill woman who criticised his health reforms.
Another is the disconnect between the chancellor’s promises and what he is able to deliver, says Andreas Busch, professor at Göttingen university.
After a decade in business, Merz became CDU chair in January 2022 on a vow to move the party back to the right after the centrist Merkel era. He pledged to win back AfD voters with tougher immigration policies and measures to revive the economy.
But since forming a coalition with the SPD in 2025, Merz has been bogged down in disputes over tax and welfare reform. Germany’s export-oriented economy has also been slow to revive, squeezed by Donald Trump’s tariffs, cheap Chinese imports and high energy costs, despite a massive stimulus package to modernise the armed forces and renovate the country’s ageing infrastructure.
“Merz has failed to deliver on any of his boldly proclaimed goals,” Güllner said. “He has not strengthened the CDU after the Angela Merkel era, but rather weakened it. He has not halved the AfD’s vote share, but instead driven it to unimaginable heights.”
A botched attempt before the summer to oust the transport minister, a respected CDU figure, also exposed Merz’s vulnerability within his party.
Merz’s handpicked replacement withdrew hours before the reshuffle was due to be announced, leaving the outgoing minister in limbo for days. The minister’s brother, a state premier, called the process “badly executed” and disinvited the chancellor from a party meeting.
The episode underlined Merz’s poor political touch and thin base of loyalists, said Busch. The signs were already there: it took him three attempts to become party chair and, unprecedentedly, two rounds of voting in the Bundestag to be elected chancellor.
“This is the cost of dropping out of politics for more than 10 years,” said Busch. “He lacks people around him who can demonstrate absolute blind loyalty and trust.”
Asked in a television interview on Sunday whether he had become “a burden” for his party, Merz said a leader pursuing social reforms could hardly expect to be popular. He defended his record on migration, after restoring border controls and tightening asylum rules, and pointed to green shoots in the economy. “We are slowly growing again. More time is needed,” he said.
But Merz may already be running out of it. More pain could follow on September 20, with elections in Berlin, where both Die Linke and the AfD are polling strongly, and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, where the ruling SPD is battling the far right.
The firewall may have fuelled rather than slowed the rise of the AfD, Stecker said. But with the far-right party now aiming for first place, any change of strategy may have come too late.
“It’s late for the CDU and it’s also pretty late for the AfD to accept any offer of co-operation because it now dreams of absolute majorities,” he said. “And if this doesn’t happen in September, they may just need to wait another year or two.”
Data visualisation by Alan Smith
