Hunch. Giving up the party job while staying chancellor is the cheaper concession and it is the one move in this record that was made quickly, but Angela Merkel gave the job up in 2018 and still left the chancellery three years later, and Merz says he means to push his reforms through.
The party market resolves on the CDU's own board page, cdu.de, read on 19 December 2026: YES if Friedrich Merz has ceased to be CDU chairman or has publicly said he will give the post up, NO otherwise. If the page is not updated, reports from two of BBC News, Reuters and The Guardian settle it.
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.