Merkel acknowledged Monday that the refugee issue dominated three state elections and that many voters felt there is no satisfactory solution yet.
Advertisement
The AfD was launched in 2013 as an anti-euro party but has since shifted its focus to migrants, campaigning against mosques and urging voters to have more children to avoid the need for immigration.
Wolf and Kloeckner last month called for Germany to impose daily refugee quotas – something Merkel opposes but which neighboring Austria has since put in place.
Germany registered almost 1.1 million people as asylum-seekers previous year as Merkel insisted “we will manage” the challenge.
That made clear a sizeable minority is uneasy about Merkel’s policies.
Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen said that 80 per cent of voters in Sunday’s polls had chosen political parties that ‘advocate a European solution to the refugee crisis and support the chancellor’s course’.
While “particularly disappointing” for the CDU, the results allow Merkel to blame regional party leaders who criticized her migration policy and lost, while affording her some ammunition against her internal critics, said Carsten Nickel, Brussels-based analyst at researcher Teneo Intelligence. They included Baden-Wuerttemberg, an economic powerhouse and longtime conservative stronghold where the CDU embarrassingly finished second behind the left-leaning Greens.
Neugebauer said “doubts will persist in parts of her own party” over Merkel’s approach.
“The answer to the population after such an election result can not be that everything continues as it was”, he added.
“I would like my party, the CDU and CSU as a whole, to discuss such questions in great unity”, she said. “And if the impression arises that the CDU is not united, that the (conservative bloc) is not united, then it is hard or more hard to convince people”.
While her government has tightened asylum rules, she still insists on a pan-European solution to the migrant crisis, ignoring demands for unilateral national measures.
“The only logical effect of the result is a significant correction in the refugee policy”, said Hans Michelbach, the vice-chair of the CSU’s faction in the lower house of parliament.
Strong performances would boost AfD’s hopes of entering the national parliament next year, but it remains to be seen how it will perform in the long term. However, that a party explicitly aiming to make Germany “a Fatherland once again” now holds parliamentary seats in eight of the country’s 16 federal states should cause concern to liberals right across Europe. If it can establish itself as a long-term force, that will leave Germany with a six-party system – compared with three in the 1970s – making it ever-tougher to form governments.
‘This is why bringing about a change of course now would be wrong, ‘ Oettinger said.
Advertisement
By splintering the vote beyond the mainstream parties, Sunday’s polls opened the prospect of new coalitions at state level in a changing German political landscape.
