For over a decade the party at the core of Angela Merkel’s chancellorship, Germany’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) is no longer in a good way. Even as Germans celebrate thirty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, election results in the former East are turning against Merkel’s party: in last month’s election in Thuringia, her CDU slipped behind the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), in a defeat echoing other recent setbacks in Brandenburg and Saxony.

But these regional-level defeats aren’t the only headache for the CDU, today heart of a grand-coalition government together with the Social Democrats (SPD). A year after Merkel announced she would not seek another term as chancellor — beginning a succession process in the CDU — today it is fighting for its status as Germany’s biggest mass party. The electoral advance of not only the AfD but also the Greens has aggravated tensions in CDU ranks, raising doubts over whether the grand coalition — and the party’s new leadership — can even continue.

This power vacuum has, indeed, come out into the open — not least in the buildup to last weekend’s CDU convention in Leipzig, where Merkel’s heir Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer faced calls to step down as party leader. This was an unusually hasty demand, given the typically unradical standards of German conservative politics. But while “AKK” defended her position as leader, the future of the CDU — and Germany’s government — has never been as unclear.