With polls indicating support for Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union slipping, the chancellor placed her open-border refugee policy front and center as voters in Baden-Württemberg, Rhineland-Palatinate and Saxony-Anhalt prepared to go to the polls. Thea Tecklenburg, 76, said she thought young men heading for Germany should “help rebuild and defend their country”, but criticized AfD’s “agitation” and right-wing image.
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The mass assaults that saw groups of men, presumably of North African and Middle East origin, sexually harass and rob about 1,000 women in the German city of Cologne on New Year’s Eve sparked outrage across the country, with many demanding punishment for the perpetrators as well as stricter border controls.
Merkel, known for her caution, took the high-risk step last summer of opening Germany’s borders to refugees fleeing war in Syria – a move that made her Time magazine’s Person of the Year but stoked angst among Germans about integrating the migrants.
In Rhineland-Palatinate, where the fortunes of the CDU had been rising with the latest poll giving it 35 percent, the party is seen struggling to knock the Social Democratic Party, scoring 36 percent, off from the top of the list.
The AfD already has representation in five of Germany’s 16 regional parliaments and the party looks set for a strong performance in Sunday’s polls.
Merkel has been under intense pressure to change course and shut Germany’s doors after 1.1 million refugees many of them Syrians arrived in Europe’s biggest economy a year ago alone. Merkel’s open-door policy toward refugees has stirred deep divisions both in German society and the CDU as the Chancellor has rejected imposing a cap on new arrivals, favoring instead a plan to distribute refugees across the 28 European Union member states.
“We expect refugees to accept these offers (of integration)”.
A couple walks past a campaign poster for right-wing populist Alternative for Germany party reading: “Enough is enough, Saxony-Anhalt votes for AfD ” , in Magdeburg, eastern Germany.
In Baden-Wuerttemberg, a CDU stronghold for over 50 years before turning to a Green-led coalition with the SPD in 2011 after Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster, the Greens’ state premier Winfried Kretschmann, 67, is poised to pip his CDU rival.
“AfD has no political programme and no capacity to resolve problems”, he told Die Welt daily on Saturday.
“These are numbers that really hit us”, said Guido Wolf, the CDU’s leading candidate in the southwest, adding that Sunday’s was the “most hard election campaign” the party has had to run. The draft says circumcision on religious grounds is a “serious violation to fundamental rights” of young boys.
In Rhineland-Palatinate, Merkel’s party is nearly neck-and-neck with the SPD. Voting stations open at 8 a.m. and close at 6 p.m., when exit polls will be released.
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She has also shrugged them off as a temporary diversion.
