Germans doubt Merz will last the term as AfD surges before eastern elections

Friedrich Merz has been chancellor for less than a year, but a majority of Germans already treat his tenure as provisional. A YouGov survey released in late August found that 54% of respondents expect him to leave office before the next federal election, scheduled for 2029. Only 36% believe he will serve a full term. The number is striking not because German chancellors rarely fall mid-term, Helmut Schmidt lost a confidence vote in 1982, and Angela Merkel's fourth term ended with her voluntary departure, but because Merz's coalition with the Social Democrats (SPD) was supposed to represent a return to stable, centrist government after the fractious traffic-light years.

A coalition built on friction

The CDU-SPD alliance was always an awkward fit. Merz campaigned on a harder line on migration and a more business-friendly economic policy than Olaf Scholz's outgoing government. His SPD partners, led by Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil, have resisted both. The result has been a series of public disagreements over border controls, citizen's income reform, and the pace of military spending. Each dispute feeds the impression that the coalition is managing decline rather than governing. The YouGov poll did not ask why respondents expect an early exit, but the timing, fielded after a summer of policy gridlock and a deadly forest fire near Hürtgenwald that dominated headlines for days, suggests voters are reading the same tea leaves as the opposition.

Merz's own party offers little insulation. The CDU's national polling has slipped to 22% in the latest Forschungsgruppe Wahlen survey, five points behind the AfD. That is the lowest the conservatives have recorded since the Merkel era ended. In the eastern states where elections loom, the CDU is running third or fourth. Merz's authority rests on the assumption that he is the only figure who can keep the AfD out of power. If voters stop believing that, his rationale evaporates.

AfD's eastern stronghold tests the firewall

The immediate test arrives on September 6 in Saxony-Anhalt. The AfD is polling above 40% there, roughly double its nearest rival. Its state branch has been designated a confirmed right-wing extremist organisation by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), a label that also applies to the party's branches in Brandenburg, Saxony and Thuringia. In Thuringia in 2024, the AfD finished first but could not form a government because every other party refused to cooperate, the so-called Brandmauer, or firewall.

That firewall is now under pressure from two directions. AfD co-leader Tino Chrupalla used his ARD summer interview to declare that after the Saxony-Anhalt vote his party would "extend a hand to all parties." The language is deliberate: it frames the mainstream as the obstructionists. Meanwhile, an INSA poll published the same weekend found the public almost exactly split on the firewall's legitimacy. Asked whether the CDU, CSU, SPD, Greens and Left Party were right to refuse cooperation with the AfD, 45% said yes, 44% said no. Among voters under 40, opposition to the firewall was higher. The consensus that held the line in Thuringia may not hold in Saxony-Anhalt.

Weidel's radical offer: euro exit and border closure

Alice Weidel, the AfD's other co-leader, used her ZDF summer interview to sketch what an AfD government would actually do. She called for closing Germany's borders, withdrawing from the euro common currency, and leaving the Schengen agreement. "We will form the government in Saxony-Anhalt," she said. "We will also govern at the federal level." The euro demand is not new, the AfD has campaigned on it since 2013, but hearing it from a leader polling at 27% nationally gives it weight. A German exit from the euro would be the single largest shock to the single currency since its creation. It would require a treaty change or a unilateral breach, either of which would trigger immediate legal and financial chaos. Weidel did not explain the mechanism.

She was blunter on the current leadership. "Mr. Merz can't do it. Mr. Klingbeil can't do it either," she said, using the term "Flachzangen", a colloquial insult roughly meaning incompetents. "I am fed up. I don't want to be lied to anymore by some incompetents sitting up there who promise one thing and do exactly the opposite." The language is calculated. It positions the AfD as the only party speaking plainly to voters who feel betrayed by the mainstream. Whether that translates into a governing majority is a different question. No other party has agreed to work with the AfD, and the firewall holds at the federal level for now.

Fact-checking the alternative narrative

Chrupalla's ARD interview provided a case study in how the AfD constructs its alternative reality. He described the summer of 2026 as "completely normal," with dry periods and long rain. The data say otherwise. June and July were the hottest two months on record in Western Europe, averaging 21.62°C according to the EU's Copernicus climate monitoring programme. The German Weather Service (DWD) reported that the period from November 2025 to July 2026 was drier than all but two years since 1882. The Robert Koch Institute recorded more heat-related deaths in the first seven months of 2026 than in any full year previously. Chrupalla dismissed this as "scaremongering" and said the AfD considers the human contribution to climate change "very small."

On migration, he claimed "1 million rejected asylum applications" last year and 280,000 people without residence permits who "should be deported." Government figures show 930,395 rejected asylum-seekers living in Germany as of December 2025, but that total accumulates decisions going back years, many of whom gained residency through other routes. As of June 2026, 258,845 people were required to leave, but nearly 200,000 had deportation suspended for family, health or documentation reasons. The distinction matters: it turns a complex administrative backlog into a simple narrative of state failure.

Chrupalla also defended Laurens Nothdurft, the AfD parliamentary group's legal adviser in Saxony-Anhalt, against links to the banned neo-Nazi group Heimattreue Deutsche Jugend. Nothdurft was elected the group's second federal leader in 1999. The AfD's statutes bar HDJ members unless a state executive board votes by two-thirds to admit them after disclosure. It is unclear whether that vote occurred. Chrupalla claimed Nothdurft had "clearly distanced himself"; no public statement exists.

Postal voting becomes a battlefield

Chrupalla opened a second front by attacking postal voting ahead of the Saxony-Anhalt election. He told ARD he had heard from nursing-home caregivers that "the pen was, so to speak, guided" for elderly voters, calling such manipulation "undisputed." He demanded the abolition of postal voting, which was introduced as an exceptional measure, and criticised the storage of ballot documents in town halls where "hardly any verification takes place." Germany's electoral authorities have detailed security protocols for postal ballots, including sealed containers, witness requirements and camera monitoring in many municipalities. Chrupalla offered no evidence for his claims. The strategy is familiar: delegitimise the mechanism before the count, so that a loss can be framed as fraud.

Public opinion: fear, indifference and the ban question

The INSA poll captures a country that cannot agree on what the AfD represents. Forty-two percent say they fear the party; 49% say they do not. Among over-70s, fear rises to 55%. The generational split mirrors the east-west divide: eastern voters are more likely to see the AfD as a normal protest vehicle, western voters as a threat to democracy. The same poll found the public exactly divided on a constitutional ban, 42% support an application to the Federal Constitutional Court, 42% oppose, 16% undecided. A ban proceeding would take years, require a two-thirds Bundestag majority to initiate, and carries the risk of martyrdom if it fails. The numbers suggest neither side has the political capital to force the issue.

Economic storm clouds gather

The political turbulence coincides with an industrial crisis. The head of Volkswagen warned in August of "major cuts" as the carmaker contends with falling European demand, Chinese competition, and the delayed transition to electric vehicles. VW employs roughly 300,000 people in Germany alone. Any large-scale restructuring would hit Lower Saxony, where the state holds a 20% stake, and reverberate through the supplier network across Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg. The traffic-light government's industrial policy was criticised for hesitation; the Merz-Klingbeil coalition has not yet articulated a coherent alternative. The AfD opposes the EU's 2035 combustion-engine phase-out, positioning itself as the defender of automotive jobs. That message resonates in regions where the industry defines local identity.

Meanwhile, the EVG rail union has threatened nationwide regional strikes from January unless the government toughens penalties for attacks on train staff. Union chief Martin Burkert told Bild am Sonntag that promised legislation must reach the Bundestag before year-end or the union would "bring operations to a standstill." The dispute adds to a sense of systems under strain: transport, energy, housing, migration management. Each failure feeds the AfD's core argument, that the state no longer functions.