Two months after Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, the head of the CSU, first went head-to-head with Merkel, the party's fortunes have declined further and its prospects look dimmer ahead of pivotal regional elections next month. Long the dominant force in Bavaria with an absolute majority in its state parliament, the CSU's support has dropped to a historic low of 36 percent—a more than 10 percent drop from the last election five years ago, and a sign that it will almost certainly need to work with another party form a coalition government in Bavaria after October's vote. Meanwhile, Seehofer and Markus Soeder, the CSU's co-leader and the Bavarian state premier, have become increasingly unpopular in their own state.
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