I watched the numbers from Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania with an unusual sense of recognition. From Karachi, German state politics can sometimes look remote. Not this time.
The Alternative für Deutschland had just finished first in another German state election. According to the preliminary result, it won 38.2 percent of the second votes in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. The governing Social Democrats finished close behind at 35.5 percent.
Then came the number that caught my attention: 4.9 percent.
That was the result for Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s CDU. On the preliminary result, the party failed to cross the five-percent threshold and will have no seats in the new Landtag. It was the CDU’s worst result in any German state election since 1949.
The AfD had won the largest share of votes. Yet by Monday morning, the central political question was not how it would form a government.
It was how the other parties could form one without it.
For me, that is the more important story coming out of Sunday’s election.
Winning the Most Votes Is Not the Same as Forming a Government
Germany is a parliamentary democracy. That distinction matters.
A party does not automatically receive the state premiership because it finishes first. In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the Landtag elects the minister-president. The successful candidate initially requires the support of a majority of all members of parliament.
The AfD therefore has no automatic constitutional right to lead the next government merely because it received more votes than any other party.
The arithmetic explains what happens next.
The preliminary distribution gives the AfD 32 seats and the SPD 29. The Left and Greens receive five seats each, producing a 71-seat parliament. The CDU and FDP receive none.
A majority requires 36 seats.
The AfD is therefore the largest parliamentary group, but it cannot govern alone.
The other parties represented in the Landtag have rejected a coalition with it. One mathematically possible alternative brings together the SPD, Left and Greens. Under the preliminary distribution, those parties would hold 39 seats.
The AfD has won the largest share of votes without necessarily winning executive power.
Nothing about that is unusual under parliamentary rules. The political consequences, however, are becoming harder to ignore.
The Firewall Is Becoming an Arithmetic Problem
Germans use the word Brandmauer, or firewall, to describe the refusal of established parties to cooperate with the AfD.
The idea is straightforward. Parties that disagree sharply with one another can still decide that the AfD remains outside their coalition calculations.
That position has so far helped keep the party out of state and federal government even as its electoral support has grown.
Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania exposes the mathematical consequence.
In 2021, the AfD received 16.7 percent there. On Sunday, it received 38.2 percent. Its share has more than doubled.
Every additional seat held by a party excluded from coalition negotiations reduces the combinations available to everyone else.
German constitutional law does not require other parties to cooperate with the AfD. Parliamentary democracy also does not give the largest party an automatic right to govern. A government needs parliamentary support.
But the political effect is visible.
When almost four voters in ten support one party while every other parliamentary party refuses to govern with it, the remaining coalition arithmetic becomes more restrictive.
Reuters identified the same structural problem after Sunday’s elections. As support fragments across parties and the AfD grows, stable majorities are becoming harder to construct.
The firewall is therefore doing more than defining a political boundary.
It increasingly shapes the process of forming governments.
Manuela Schwesig Shows Why State Politics Still Matters
The result also warns against reading every German election through national politics.
The AfD finished first, but the SPD performed much better than many pre-election expectations suggested.
Minister-President Manuela Schwesig’s party received 35.5 percent, down from 39.6 percent in 2021 but close enough to leave her with a plausible route to another government.
ARD’s analysis points to Schwesig herself as an important factor.
Almost half of surveyed SPD voters said they would not have voted for the party without her. About half identified the leading candidate as the most important reason for their choice.
German politics may be fragmenting, but regional political identities still matter. Voters do not simply reproduce national polling numbers when they enter a state-election booth.
Turnout adds another layer.
It reached 78.1 percent, compared with 70.8 percent in 2021.
The AfD’s result therefore cannot easily be explained by unusually low participation. More than one million people voted in an electorate of roughly 1.31 million.
The AfD still emerged as the largest party.
The CDU’s 4.9 Percent Deserves Attention
The AfD’s 38.2 percent naturally dominates the headlines. Yet I keep returning to the CDU’s 4.9 percent.
On the preliminary result, one of Germany’s historic governing parties will have no seats in this Landtag.
The CDU received 13.3 percent in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania in 2021. On Sunday, it fell below the parliamentary threshold.
That result matters beyond Schwerin because Friedrich Merz is not merely CDU leader. He is Germany’s chancellor.
Voter-flow analysis also shows movement from the CDU toward the AfD. The AfD gained support from other directions as well, which makes it difficult to explain its rise through a single group of voters.
The CDU now faces a strategic problem.
A tougher position on issues such as immigration could reduce the political distance between it and the AfD. A different approach could fail to recover voters who have already moved away from the party.
Sunday’s numbers cannot tell the CDU which strategy would work. They establish the scale of its problem.
Merz himself described the outcome as a “disaster.” He has nevertheless indicated that he intends to remain chancellor and continue his reform programme.
State elections do not determine who holds the federal chancellorship. Repeated regional losses can, however, alter political authority within a national party.
Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania has made that pressure harder to miss.
The AfD’s Legal Status Requires Precise Language
Careful language also matters when discussing the AfD itself.
In May 2025, Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution announced that it had upgraded the federal AfD to a confirmed right-wing extremist classification. The party challenged that decision.
In February 2026, the Cologne Administrative Court ruled in interim proceedings that the federal agency could not, for the time being, classify and treat the national AfD as a confirmed right-wing extremist organisation while the main legal proceedings remained unresolved.
The ruling did not amount to a judicial declaration that the AfD was non-extremist.
It concerned whether the higher classification could be applied while the underlying litigation continued.
The national party’s earlier treatment as a suspected right-wing extremist case had survived previous judicial scrutiny. The legal situation can also differ at state level because regional branches are assessed separately.
The distinction matters to the Brandmauer debate.
The firewall is primarily a political practice. It is not a constitutional mechanism that automatically prevents the AfD from participating in government.
Political parties decide whom they are prepared to enter coalitions with.
If the AfD eventually assembled sufficient parliamentary support for a government, the issue would move from political isolation to the ordinary constitutional procedures for forming that government.
Sunday’s result has not produced that situation.
It has made the underlying political question harder to avoid.
The Coalition System Is Under Greater Pressure
Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania is not an isolated case.
Earlier this month, the AfD also finished first in Saxony-Anhalt. Sunday’s result therefore marked the second time in two weeks that it had taken the largest vote share in a German state election.
Berlin produced a different result on the same day. The Left finished first there, while the CDU suffered another substantial loss and the AfD increased its support.
The outcomes were different, but both showed voters moving away from the traditional political centre.
Germany’s post-war political system became known for governments built around large parties and relatively manageable coalition arrangements. That task becomes more difficult as votes spread across parties that cannot, or will not, govern together.
The firewall does not cause electoral fragmentation.
Voters determine the distribution of seats.
The firewall does affect what happens afterwards because it removes one coalition option from negotiations.
As the AfD’s parliamentary presence grows, the remaining parties need more complicated combinations to reach a majority. Reuters notes that the preliminary Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania result would require three parties to form a government excluding the AfD.
The available coalition arithmetic is narrowing.
What Happens When the Largest Party Remains in Opposition?
There is a temptation to look at Sunday’s result and ask when the AfD will enter government.
I find another question more useful.
What happens if it does not?
A pattern could emerge in which the AfD wins the largest share of votes while other parties assemble parliamentary majorities without it. The AfD would then remain the largest opposition force.
Such an arrangement can operate within Germany’s parliamentary system.
Its political consequences are less certain.
The AfD can argue to supporters that electoral victories have not translated into executive power. Its opponents can answer that parliamentary democracy depends on legislative majorities rather than automatic government by whichever party finishes first.
Those competing interpretations are likely to remain part of German political debate.
There is also a practical consequence.
Parties with substantial policy disagreements may increasingly need one another simply to construct parliamentary majorities.
Compromise is one possible result. Political responsibility can also become harder for voters to trace when governments depend on increasingly broad coalitions.
That is not a uniquely German problem.
In Germany, however, the AfD’s growing size gives it particular force.
Germany Has Reached a Different Stage of the AfD Debate
For years, much of the discussion surrounding the AfD asked whether the party could become a major political force.
That question now looks dated.
Its preliminary 38.2 percent in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania supplies one answer.
The more difficult question concerns Germany’s political institutions.
Can established parties continue excluding a party of that size from coalition negotiations while constructing stable governments from an increasingly fragmented remainder?
For the moment, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania shows that they can.
On the preliminary seat distribution, the SPD, Left and Greens together have 39 seats. They need 36 for a majority. Whether they ultimately agree to govern together is a political question that the election result itself cannot answer.
The figures are also not yet final. Germany’s election authorities still have to complete the formal process for establishing the final result.
I look at the preliminary numbers from Karachi and keep returning to the same contrast.
The AfD has become the largest party in another eastern German state. At the same time, the CDU has fallen below the threshold for representation there.
Germany’s political centre is therefore dealing with something larger than the rise of one competitor. It must work out how to construct governments as the electoral space occupied by traditional governing parties changes.
Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania has shown that governing without the AfD remains mathematically possible.
What it has not settled is how German parties will manage that arithmetic if electoral fragmentation continues.