Lose one, win one. For German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and his Christian Democrats (CDU), a year packed with five regional elections has started in mixed fashion. A photo-finish loss in the federal state of Baden-Württemberg unnerved Merz’ party on March 8, before an unexpectedly clear victory in Rhineland-Palatinate on March 22 lifted the mood. Unfortunately for Merz and the future stability of his government, his coalition partner, the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), lost badly in both elections.
The result in Baden-Württemberg came as a shock to the CDU. Germany’s engineering powerhouse in the south-west and home to companies such as the Mercedes-Benz Group, Bosch, and SAP used to be part of the CDU heartland. But for the past 15 years, it had been run by the Greens’ avuncular Winfried Kretschmann—Germany’s only Green-run federal state in history. At the age of 77, however, the eco-conservative Kretschmann had called it quits, and his designated successor, Cem Özdemir, seemed to be struggling.
The son of Turkish immigrants, the 60-year-old Özdemir appeared to have had most of his political career already behind him: He was co-leader of the Greens between 2008 and 2018 and agriculture minister in the cabinet of Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) from 2021 to 2025. Even within his own party many doubted whether he would be able to add a third act. In January, the Greens lagged six percentage points behind the CDU in the polls.
The “Anatolian Swabian” Wins
But Özdemir, who used to call himself an “Anatolian Swabian” (he was born in Urach, at the foot of the Swabian Alps), managed to catch up and then overtake the CDU frontrunner, Manuel Hagel, mostly by sounding not very Green at all, be it on migration, climate, or economic policy. His party ended up with 30.2 percent of the vote, the CDU with 29.7 percent—which translates into 56 seats in the state parliament for each of them. And while some in the CDU called for a power-sharing agreement, with Hagel becoming state premier for half of the legislature period, it is highly likely that Özdemir will form the next Baden-Württemberg government and lead it for five years, with the CDU once again in the junior partner role.
Merz’ performance as chancellor, CDU Secretary-General Carsten Linnemann was quick to assure everyone, played no role in the outcome; rather, Merz’ action on the world stage had given the party in Baden-Württemberg “tail wind,” Linnemann said. And the SPD, which had a disastrous night, preferred to stay mum and move on. It had barely passed the threshold with 5.5 percent.
Özdemir is the first child of Turkish immigrants to be voted into such high office—a milestone that was rather underreported and under-reflected on election night, which in turn speaks of the changed mood around migration. Even though immigration numbers are down considerably, it continues to be the far-right Alternative für Deutschland’s (AfD) biggest political selling point. For the Greens, the unexpected win means that the party, which has been on the backfoot since the early end of the Scholz government, in which they were the junior partner, will continue to be a player within Germany’s complex and complicated political system.
Two weeks later in Rhineland-Palatinate, it was far from close: The CDU led by Gordon Schnieder won handsomely with 31 percent of the vote against the SPD, led by incumbent Premier Alexander Schweitzer, with 25.9 percent. The Social Democrats thus lost control of a federal state they had dominated for 35 years, the second devastating blow for them.
The SPD in Crisis Mode
Merz used the victory to emphasis his determination to push for more domestic reforms, including of the health, pensions, and tax system. In contrast, the SPD co-leaders, Finance Minister and Vice Chancellor Lars Klingbeil and Labor Minister Bärbel Bas, sounded dejected. Reportedly, in internal meetings, Klingbeil had indicated that he wouldn’t necessarily cling to his party job—apparently, he encouraged his leadership colleagues to tell him openly if he was seen as part of the problem. But the Social Democrats are not in revolutionary mode, at least not yet. Klingbeil and Bas will stay on, for now.
For the SPD—Germany’s oldest political party, which has often acted more with the national than the party interest in mind—the situation is close to desperate. The Social Democrats have been in office at the national level almost continuously since 1998—first as the senior coalition partner with Chancellor Gerhard Schröder at the helm, then as junior partner in three of CDU Chancellor Angela Merkel’s four governments (2005-21), then back in the chancellery with Scholz, and, since May 2025, again in the role of junior partner.
During that time, the SPD went through 11 party leaders (co-leadership was introduced in 2019), and it has become steadily weaker in elections and polls—with Scholz’ 2021 win (25.7 percent) —the one result, if unimpressive, that went against the general downward trend. Currently, the SPD is hovering at around 15 percent nationally. Merz was wise enough not to gloat after the win, and to tell his partly behind closed doors “to be nice to the SPD” in the coming weeks. The worst that could happen would be a full-blown SPD crisis with a power vacuum at the top.
SPD strategists have an almost impossible task ahead of them: Does the party need to move further to the center or further to the left? Is it seen, as the left wing thinks, as too willing to agree to future reforms, allegedly throwing its social conscience overboard in the process? Or, to the contrary, is it seen as too reform-resistant, as the right wing of the party thinks, slowing or watering down measures the country urgently needs to get going again? In Baden-Württemberg the SPD lost about 80,000 former voters to the Greens, who wanted to prevent a CDU win; in Rhineland-Palatinate, it lost 100,000 voters to the CDU who preferred the center-right candidate as the more reliably centrist one, according to infratest dimap, pollsters for the public broadcaster ARD. It’s next to impossible to derive a new direction from these kinds of results.
What makes the situation even more messy are the two other lessons from the two regional elections: The pro-business Free Democrats (FDP), who, together with the Greens and the SPD, were part of Scholz’ “traffic-light government,” have been voted out of parliament in both federal states, after not making it into the Bundestag last year either. The party, rightly blamed for the failure and early end of Scholz’ chancellorship, may well be facing a bleak future, including no longer playing a role in national politics.
But things are very different for the AfD. These elections have shown that the far-right party is now also deeply ingrained in the western parts of Germany. In Baden-Württemberg it won 18.8. percent, in Rhineland-Palatine 19.5 percent of the vote—roughly double their previous results. Come September, it could win an absolute majority in the eastern German Saxony-Anhalt and thus take charge of a federal state for the first time. The shock waves of such an event would be immense; later that month, there are also elections in Berlin and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, another eastern German state, where the party polled 35 percent in the last general election in February 2025.
An AfD wave may push the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats closer together, or it may cause an already insecure SPD to go into full panic mode. In other words, if the SPD does not find a way out of its current funk, the Merz government may end up struggling to complete its term.
Henning Hoff is executive editor of INTERNATIONALE POLITIK QUARTERLY.
