ROSTOCK, Germany — Manuela Schwesig, a popular center-left politician, is within striking distance of stopping the far-right’s advance in the former East Germany. Her success is coming, however, at a steep price for embattled Chancellor Friedrich Merz and the ailing national coalition her party helps sustain. Ahead of an election in the northeastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania on Sunday, Schwesig, the sitting premier of the state and the lead candidate for the left-leaning Social Democratic Party (SPD), has narrowed the far-right Alternative for Germany’s lead to just a few percentage points in some polls.
It’s emblematic of just how far mainstream parties have fallen across large swaths of Germany that Schwesig is considered a rare and remarkable success for simply managing to keep her SPD — a sinking party that has suffered a string of historic defeats — within range of beating the far right on Sunday in what would amount to a major upset. Schwesig, a former tax inspector who has risen to become one of Germany’s most well-liked politicians, has thrived by casting herself as a bulwark against the far right — employing the slogan “Frau gegen Blau” — “Woman against Blue,” a reference to the AfD’s party color. To help her cause, she has also frequently attacked the deeply unpopular Merz as out of touch with ordinary people and their financial struggles — exhibiting a populist streak that both distances her from a historically unpopular federal coalition while blunting the AfD’s ability to capitalize on the widespread anti-Merz sentiment that propelled its regional election victory in Saxony-Anhalt earlier this month.
Schwesig’s approach has effectively turned the election in her state into a two-party race that has greatly weakened Merz’s conservatives. Her strategy was clear during a “citizen dialogue” with a few hundred supporters held in a tent on the waterside in the port city of Rostock one evening this week. When someone from the crowd asked what she would do to halt rising gasoline prices, Schwesig, dressed in the bright red of her SPD, called it “fully unacceptable” that Merz had failed to implement a price cap to lower costs for consumers in her rural state, where people often need to drive long distances to get to work.
Schwesig’s success is creating an unprecedented challenge for Merz’s conservatives — and may hasten the demise of the coalition he shares with the SPD. Recent polls show Merz’s conservative Christian Democratic Union has crashed to around 7% support in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania in recent days, as the race increasingly morphs into a contest between the strongest mainstream candidate and the far right. That level of support for the CDU would already constitute the worst result for the party in any state or federal election in Germany’s postwar history.
A further decline would put the party at risk of failing to meet the 5% vote threshold required to enter the state parliament. A CDU collapse on this scale will almost certainly intensify internal debate that has been roiling since the summer over replacing Merz in a so-called Kanzlertausch. Conservative leaders are blaming Schwesig’s “Frau gegen Blau” campaign for effectively taking them out of the running in the state as centrist voters rally around the SPD candidate to prevent an AfD victory.
From Schwesig’s perspective, however, the CDU and Merz have no one to blame but themselves. A vote for her and the SPD, she said during her campaign event in Rostock, “is the only real chance to prevent the AfD from becoming the strongest party.” Schwesig is by no means simply a local politician. Having served as Germany’s family minister for a three-and-a-half-year stint under former Chancellor Angela Merkel, she has a national profile and a high degree of influence within the SPD.
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