Friedrich Merz is fighting for his political survival after his Christian Democrats (CDU) party suffered stinging defeats in two key elections.
Exit polls for the state elections, in Berlin and in the eastern state of Mecklenburg Vorpommern, both showed the CDU trailing far behind the hard-Right Alternative for Germany (AfD).
In Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the AfD surged with 37 per cent of the vote and the CDU secured only 5.5 per cent, the exit polls showed, by far the latter party’s worst ever performance in an election. The AfD is unlikely to take power, however, without a majority.
