Friedrich Merz faces internal revolt as far-right support surges

The Chancellor’s political survival hangs in the balance as his 2018 pledge to halve the AfD’s support has collapsed into reality. Instead, the extremist-classified party has surged, currently trailing the CDU by 12 percentage points in national polling. This decline has emboldened AfD co-chair Alice Weidel, who recently declared that the CDU is effectively finished as an electoral force.

Discontent has moved from the fringes to the center of the Chancellery. Internal party frustration reached a nadir in Saxony-Anhalt, where local CDU officials actively barred Merz from campaign posters to avoid associating with his toxic approval ratings. Recent data from Forsa/RTL indicates that 88 percent of Germans disapprove of his performance, with a majority of his own party members now favoring a change in leadership. While the CDU secured a modest victory in Lower Saxony last weekend, the momentum remains firmly with the opposition. As Berlin and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania prepare for Sunday’s vote, Merz faces a compounding storm of industrial decline at Volkswagen, regional economic instability, and a caucus that is rapidly losing the will to shield him from his own political failures.