Within days of the CDU’s worst-ever state election result, CSU leader Markus Söder ruled out any move against Chancellor Friedrich Merz “under no circumstances,” calling him the right man to stand by his own reform agenda. Read as loyalty, that statement doesn’t square with what CDU insiders are reportedly saying privately in the same week: that Merz must resign, or be forced out, by September 21 — the Monday after both Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern vote. Those two things are not actually in tension. Söder’s declaration and the party’s private deadline are the same strategy, viewed from two different rooms, and the coverage treating them as contradictory is missing the mechanism entirely.
THE CONTEXT
Germany’s chancellor comes from the CDU, but the party governs nationally in permanent partnership with its Bavarian sister party, the CSU, whose leader has run for the joint chancellor candidacy before. Söder lost that internal contest to Armin Laschet in 2021, after which Laschet led the CDU/CSU bloc to its worst-ever federal election result. That history sits behind everything happening now: the party’s institutional memory of a messy, public pre-election succession fight is recent and specific, not abstract. Since Saxony-Anhalt’s 43.8% AfD result on September 6, reporting has named Hendrik Wüst, North Rhine-Westphalia’s minister-president, as the CDU’s only broadly credible alternative to Merz, with Hesse’s Boris Rhein a secondary option — while the same reporting describes Söder himself as “unacceptable to the CDU” for the top job, and Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt’s chances as “absurd.” Merz himself has offered nothing more specific than a warning that “there will have to be consequences” since the Saxony-Anhalt result, without naming what those consequences might be — a vagueness that reads differently depending on whether you assume he doesn’t yet know, or knows and isn’t saying.
THE ARGUMENT
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Start with why moving against a sitting chancellor before an election, rather than after, is the worse option for everyone involved. A pre-election ouster would be blamed for whatever results follow, hands the AfD a ready-made “chaos in Berlin” storyline days before two states vote, and would have to happen before anyone knows the actual seat counts or coalition arithmetic either state produces — exactly the information a successor would want in hand before taking the job. Waiting until after the results land solves all three problems at once. That is not proof of a coordinated plot; it is simply the lower-risk sequence, and lower-risk sequences tend to be the ones political actors converge on without needing to coordinate at all.
Look at who benefits from which version of events. Wüst and Rhein are both sitting state premiers with their own political calendars, and neither has moved publicly, which is itself informative: appearing to grab for the chancellery is precisely the charge that has ended CDU/CSU leadership ambitions before, Söder’s own 2021 defeat included. A successor who wants the job cleanly needs Merz to be seen failing first, in public, on a date everyone already agrees is decisive — which is exactly what September 20 supplies, and exactly why no one credible needs to say anything before then. Söder’s declaration of loyalty costs him nothing real, since his own party has already ruled him out as the alternative regardless of what happens to Merz; a costless statement of support is evidence of timing, not evidence of conviction. The same logic applies with less force to Wüst and Rhein: both have real incentive to let Merz’s own party base, rather than a rival premier, deliver the verdict that he has to go, because a chancellor who falls to his own voters looks like accountability, while one pushed out by an ambitious colleague looks like a coup the party then has to explain.
The Social Democrats’ posture fits the same logic from a different angle. Secretary-General Tim Klüssendorf’s public line urging the CDU to “keep its nerve” is not fraternal generosity toward a coalition partner in trouble. The SPD sits in this government as the junior partner, and a chaotic CDU leadership fight carries real risk of tipping toward a snap federal election — a gamble that offers no obvious upside to a junior partner with everything to lose and nothing to gain from an early vote it didn’t choose the timing of. Everyone currently saying calm, reassuring things in public has a specific, self-interested reason to be saying them, and that reason has nothing to do with confidence in Merz personally.
The honest objection is that this reads more cynically than the evidence strictly requires — Söder may simply believe, sincerely, that changing chancellors mid-crisis would compound instability rather than resolve it, and that belief doesn’t have to be fake for the timing argument to also be true. Both can hold at once. The test that separates them doesn’t require reading anyone’s mind: watch whether Söder’s, Wüst’s or Rhein’s public tone shifts in the 48 hours after results land on September 20, compared to what each is saying this week. Genuine conviction should sound the same before and after a bad result. Tactical patience usually doesn’t.
THE SCENARIOS
Base case, roughly 55% probability: Merz survives past September 21 in the job regardless of how badly the CDU performs in either state. No successor wants to be the one seen forcing him out immediately after a defeat, so a formal leadership reckoning gets pushed toward a later party congress instead of settled in the days right after the vote, buying months without resolving anything. This is the path every incentive described above points toward, and it depends mainly on the results in both states falling short of catastrophic — bad, but not so bad that waiting becomes politically indefensible on its own.
Downside case for Merz: results are bad enough in both states at once — an AfD win or strong plurality in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern stacked on a CDU collapse into third place in Berlin — that Wüst’s or Rhein’s camps go public within 48 hours, and Merz either resigns or is pushed into a confidence vote before the year is out, following almost exactly the sequencing this piece describes rather than a sudden break from it. The specific marker to watch is whether Wüst’s own office issues any statement at all in the first 48 hours — silence would suggest the base case holds, while even a carefully neutral comment on “the party’s path forward” would signal positioning has already begun.
Upside case for Merz: mainstream parties outperform current polling in both states, removing the immediate pressure entirely and letting Merz reframe his vague “there will have to be consequences” line as a policy shift — migration, communication strategy, a cabinet reshuffle short of his own departure — rather than a personnel change at the top. Under this path, Söder’s “under no circumstances” ages well regardless of whether it was sincere or tactical, because the question it was hedging against never actually arrives.
THE TAKEAWAY
Söder’s “under no circumstances” is not evidence the crisis is contained. It’s evidence the people best positioned to replace Merz have already decided the smart move is to let him take Sunday’s results personally, in public, before anyone acts on them. Watch what Söder, Wüst and Rhein each say in the 48 hours after Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern report their results, set against what they’re saying this week. If the tone holds steady, the loyalty was real. If it shifts the moment the numbers are in, September 21 was the plan all along, and Sunday’s votes were never really about Sunday.
