Romania

Bucharest, September 21, 2026. The Romanian press first notes the unprecedented downfall of Friedrich Merz's Christian Democratic Union, excluded for the first time in its history from a Landtag. In Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the CDU garnered 4.9% of the vote according to Infratest dimap, below the 5% threshold, compared to 13% in 2021: "the worst result in the party's history," notes Mediafax, which recalls that never since the founding of the Federal Republic had the CDU failed to meet this threshold in a regional election. The Chancellor himself described the score as a "disaster" that "cannot be sugarcoated," saying he was "overwhelmed by the polarization between the SPD and the AfD."

The Alternative for Germany won with 38.3% in this region, narrowly surpassing the SPD (35.4%), which lost its first-place position after twenty-eight years of uninterrupted governance in Schwerin. Digi24, citing The Guardian, notes that this election comes two weeks after the Saxony-Anhalt election, where the AfD, described as "anti-immigration and pro-Kremlin," had already achieved its best regional score. The publication questions Merz's ability to remain in power "after only sixteen months in office" and mentions, without much conviction, the possibility of early elections.

In Berlin, it is Die Linke that dominates the Romanian narrative: 25.3% of the vote, the best result for the radical left in the capital since the 1990 reunification, a score doubled compared to 2023. The CDU fell to around 19%, the SPD dropped below 12%, while the AfD progressed to 14-16%. The incumbent CDU-SPD coalition lost its majority; G4Media details the profile of the head of the list Elif Eralp, 45, born in Munich to Turkish immigrant parents and naturalized German in 1996, poised to become mayor with a Linke-Verts-SPD alliance.

Vice-Chancellor and Social Democrat Lars Klingbeil admits a communications defeat: "we failed to explain the reforms in a way that makes people see that things are changing," he says, regretting that "in Berlin, we often only talked about budget cuts." Merz, for his part, promises to stay in office to see through his "package of economic and social reforms."