Hunch. Pressure is more open than in most of the 14, with a third heavy defeat in a month and named successors already in print, but eight state premiers from his own party backed him four days ago and no one has declared against him.
The chancellor market resolves on the official site of the German chancellor, bundeskanzler.de, read on 19 December 2026: YES if Friedrich Merz has ceased to hold the office by then, NO if he still holds it. If the site is unclear, reports from two of BBC News, Reuters and The Guardian settle it, and a caretaker arrangement in which Merz has formally left counts as YES.
We looked for every German state election since 1949 where the sitting chancellor's own party lost 10 points or more, with more than a year left before the next federal election. Then we checked whether that chancellor was still in office 90 days later. We found 14 such defeats. Five chancellors account for them, and six belong to Angela Merkel. Hesse and Lower Saxony voted on the same day in 2003 and were read as one verdict on Gerhard Schroeder, so they count as one. The list also crosses reunification in 1990, which added five states and changed the party system.