She has suffered considerably worse losses at the party’s hands in other states this year, but the Berlin results will be seen as highly significant.
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The SPD, Merkel’s junior coalition partner at the national level, wants to form a coalition with the Greens and possibly the radical Left party in the city-state of Berlin.
Berlin’s SPD Mayor Michael Mueller has sharply criticized the AfD’s migration policy during the campaign, saying a double-digit score for the right-wing party would be seen around the world as the rebirth of the Nazis.
At the same time, the anti-capitalist Left Party, a descendant of the former East German communists, gained 4 percent to 15.7 percent overall and new nationalist anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany, known as the AfD, easily entered its 10th state parliament with 14.1 percent of the vote.
At noon, some 25 percent had cast their vote, 6 points more than the midday turnout during the last election in 2011, authorities said.
Without enough support for the governing SPD-CDU “grand coalition” to continue and with five parties with very similar strengths, a three-way coalition will nearly certainly form the next government.
Such a “red-red-green” coalition, its members hope, could one day be replicated at the national level.
Merkel meanwhile will face further pressure “to explain her political strategy”, said Gero Neugebauer of Berlin’s Free University.
“To ask this question one year before federal elections would be suicidal, especially since in the CDU there is no credible successor”, he said.
The CSU’s Bavarian finance minister Markus Soeder was quick to call it the “second massive wake-up call” in two weeks.
Mrs Merkel’s CDU came second, but with just 18 per cent of the vote the result was disastrous for the party.
In another debacle, thousands of refugees were left waiting for days and weeks a year ago at Berlin’s then hopelessly overwhelmed Lageso central migrant registration centre, with many forced to sleep in the dirt outside.
Voting in the German capital started at 8 a.m. and some 2.5 million people are eligible to decide who should represent them in the Berlin city assembly.
Casting his ballot on Sunday, police officer Tobias Ludley, 27, said he anxious about Berlin’s cash-strapped public services, as well as its “little building site”, the BER.
The AfD, founded in 2013 as an anti-euro party, was the big victor.
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“The AfD is appealing to people who otherwise wouldn’t vote, the protest voters”, he said, anxious about the party gaining ground in a city which was normally “a shining example of multiculturalism”.
