Friedrich Merz will lose Sunday’s regional election — whatever the result – POLITICO

MAGDEBURG, Germany — For Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Sunday’s election in eastern Germany offers no good outcomes — only varying degrees of political humiliation.

The Alternative for Germany, or AfD, is expected to win decisively in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, finishing well ahead of Merz’s conservatives, according to pre-election polls. This result would show, in the clearest terms, the degree to which the far right has strengthened and surpassed mainstream parties in broad swaths of the country.

That humiliation would be even worse for Merz if the AfD wins enough votes to secure an outright parliamentary majority and govern the state alone. At least from the perspective of Germany’s mainstream parties, it would give him an ignominious place in the country’s postwar history as the national leader who presided over the far-right’s first rise to real governing power since World War II.