Right-leaning outlets skipped the German elections that could end Merz
Berlin and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania held state elections Sunday that could determine whether Friedrich Merz survives as chancellor, with the far-right AfD expected to gain in both. The coverage is thorough on the center and left. Conservative and right-leaning outlets are simply not here. For a story about a far-right party's electoral advance, that absence is the most useful thing the coverage tells you.
German state elections held amid far-right surge and pressure on Chancellor Merz
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What happened
Voters in Berlin and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania went to the polls Sunday, September 20, 2026, in two state elections watched as a referendum on Chancellor Friedrich Merz. Merz is already at record-low approval ratings, and his opponents have grown vocal enough that DW published a standalone explainer on the three constitutional mechanisms for removing a sitting chancellor. The AfD, Germany's far-right party, was forecast to gain in both states. Berlin's election carries an additional wrinkle: roughly a quarter of the city's residents, the highest share ever recorded, are non-citizens ineligible to vote despite living in one of Europe's most internationally diverse capitals. About 3.8 million people across the two states were eligible to cast ballots. Seven outlets covered the story. Not one of them leans right.
DW did the most original reporting, by a distance
DW ran three separate pieces where everyone else ran one. The live blog tracked results in real time. A second piece explained the three constitutional paths to removing Merz from office, a level of structural context no other outlet provided. The third examined Berlin's non-citizen exclusion problem directly, naming the specific figure: one in four Berlin residents cannot vote, the highest proportion in the city's history. That last piece is the only reporting in this entire set that treats the election as something other than a Merz-versus-AfD binary.
The NYT and BBC led with Merz's survival, not the AfD's growth
The New York Times framed the elections around whether results would "galvanize" the AfD or "spur a backlash," treating the far-right party as the central actor. The BBC put Merz at the center instead, leading with the chancellor's "intense political pressure" and the possibility the results could "decide his fate." Both frames are defensible. Together they illustrate that the same election can read as a story about a party rising or a politician falling, depending on which camera you point.
What one side told you that the other didn't
No right-leaning outlet covered the AfD's best electoral night.
The AfD is a far-right party forecast to post significant gains in two German states on the same day. Conservative and right-leaning outlets, which spent years covering European far-right movements as a populist wave worth taking seriously, produced zero pieces in this set. The story of whether that wave is still rising ran entirely without the outlets most likely to contextualize it sympathetically. Readers who get their news from right-leaning sources went into Monday knowing nothing about it.
One in four Berlin voters can't vote. One outlet reported it.
DW's piece on Berlin's non-citizen exclusion is the only reporting in this set that names a structural democratic problem rather than a horse-race outcome. A quarter of Berlin residents, the highest share on record, had no vote in their own city's election. Al Jazeera, the BBC, Reuters, and the NYT all covered the same election without mentioning it. That figure reframes the entire result: whatever mandate emerges from Berlin reflects, at most, three-quarters of the people who live there.
DW published a chancellor-removal explainer. Nobody else thought to.
When an outlet publishes a standalone piece explaining how a sitting leader can be legally removed from office, that is a signal about how seriously the political threat is being taken. DW ran that piece. Reuters, the NYT, and the BBC all noted Merz is under pressure without explaining what pressure could actually produce. The constitutional mechanics matter: Germany's constructive vote of no confidence requires the Bundestag to simultaneously elect a replacement, a high bar that the explainer makes clear has only been invoked twice in postwar history.
What to watch
Results from Berlin and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania will be called Sunday night European time. If the AfD finishes first in either state, watch whether right-leaning English-language outlets pick up the story by Monday morning. A first-place AfD finish is the kind of result that tends to break through editorial indifference. If they don't cover it even then, the absence becomes a pattern, not a gap.
This kind of gap — where one side reports a fact and the other doesn’t mention it — shows up in about 40% of major stories.