Chancellor Friedrich Merz's party finished first in municipal polls in Germany's most populous state, but the biggest winner in the first electoral test since Merz's government took power was the far-right Alternative for Germany, which nearly tripled its showing compared with five years ago.
Final results Monday showed that Merz's center-right Christian Democratic Union took 33.3% of the vote in Sunday's elections for councils and mayors in North Rhine-Westphalia, a western region that is home to about 18 million people. Its partners in a national government that so far has failed to lift the country's mood, the center-left Social Democrats — for whom the state was long a reliable heartland — took 22.1%.
