Could Merkel’s pleas for stability destabilize Germany?

KASSEL, Germany — The Allied bombers roared over Kassel just before 9 p.m. on an October evening. Within minutes, 70 percent of homes were destroyed. Ten thousand people were dead. And the medieval heart of this central German city — once home to the Brothers Grimm, later an engine of the Nazi war machine — lay in ruins.

Seventy-five years later, to the day, German Chancellor Angela Merkel was in a rebuilt Kassel to make her case as the antidote to a world turned newly perilous.

At a time when politics worldwide is becoming ever more polarized, she told her party’s faithful ahead of state elections here Sunday, Germany cannot afford to add to the turmoil. Instead, she pleaded in a less-than-packed hotel ballroom, voters need to “stay the course of stable good governance.”

Stability has been at the core of Ms. Merkel’s political brand during her 13-year run as chancellor. Yet it’s no longer something she can offer. Amid dysfunction in her government and surging support for opposition parties, momentum is growing for a change at the top as the only way to calm Germany’s roiling political waters.

The push for Ms. Merkel to step aside is in its formative phase, with no definitive plan for how to dethrone her or who would succeed her. But it could accelerate sharply after Sunday’s vote, which is shaping up as just the latest humiliation for a chancellor who, until recently, had been as politically dominant as any democratically elected leader could hope to be.

Technically speaking, Ms. Merkel’s name is nowhere on the ballot when voters in the 6-million-strong state of Hesse — home of Frankfurt, Germany’s financial hub — select a new Parliament. Yet the election is being read as a verdict on her performance a year after Germans nationwide gave her the chance to rule for a recordtying fourth straight term.

“It’s a referendum on the central government,” said Wolfgang Schroeder, who teaches politics at the University of Kassel. “And voters are not happy with what’s happening in Berlin.”

Both governing parties at the national level — Ms. Merkel’s center-right Christian Democratic Union, or CDU, and the center-left Social Democrats, or SPD — are careening toward double-digit losses of support in Hesse, polls show. The CDU’s performance could be dismal enough to cost it control in a state it has governed for nearly two decades.

If that happens, Ms. Merkel could face an internal revolt when the party convenes for its annual conference in December and chooses whether to extend her run as CDU chairwoman. A loss there would be politically crippling.