Angela Merkel has admitted her government shares responsibility for Sunday’s disastrous regional election result in Bavaria, blaming it partly on an erosion of confidence in politics on a national level.

“A lot of trust has been lost,” the German chancellor said at a business conference on Monday, a day after her Bavarian allies in the Christian Social Union (CSU) were handed their worst result since 1954 in the prosperous southern state.

She said the result had shown that even a thriving economy and high employment were not enough to win over voters. As a consequence, her biggest takeaway from Sunday’s trouncing was that she “must better ensure that this trust is there and also make the results of our work visible,” she said.

Germany’s ruling parties were trying and ride out the fallout from the vote on Monday, despite calls for members of Angela Merkel’s government to resign over the debacle.

The Social Democrats (SPD), the national coalition’s junior party, were also reeling after their vote halved, slumping into single figures for the first time in the state. The party came fifth on 9.5%, far behind the Greens and below the far-right AfD.

The humiliating result for Merkel’s two partners is a serious blow for her shaky coalition, yet by Monday morning no heads had rolled despite calls from within the CSU for the party’s leader, Horst Seehofer, to resign.

“I’m also not going to discuss my position today,” said a defiant Seehofer, speaking after a meeting of the CSU leadership which unanimously backed the Bavarian premier, Markus Söder, to continue in his position.

Seehofer has been roundly blamed in the party for the result, which has been seen as punishment for sowing division within the coalition over migration policy.

“A leadership debate cannot be avoided,” Peter Ramsauer, a former CSU deputy leader, told German media on Monday. He said the CSU had received a “disastrous result” that “shouldn’t be relativised”.

Volker Ullrich, a CSU MP, told Der Spiegel: “We need a different style, language that connects and good governance. The attempt to gain support on the right [has] failed.”

Calls for resignations also came from within Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU). “It probably can’t work without personnel consequences,” the CDU premier of Schleswig-Holstein, Daniel Günther, told Die Welt. “However, I don’t think much of making individuals responsible. The entire CSU leadership has made mistakes in the past years … no one can be excluded.”

Speaking after exit polls on Sunday night, Söder called it a “difficult day” for the CSU but said his party had a clear mandate to form a government. He is now expected to hurriedly form a coalition to govern the state with the centre-right Free Voters, excluding the Greens despite their record-high showing.

All eyes will now turn to another regional vote, in Hesse at the end of the month, where both the CDU and SPD are languishing in the polls. The coalition partners will hope they can delay the final reckoning for the Bavarian disaster until then, giving them just under a fortnight to turn their fortunes around.