Critics of Chancellor Merkel’s open-door refugee policies called on her to change course after voters in three regional elections punished her conservatives and flocked to a new anti-immigration party that wants German borders closed.
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While the governing party of Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Christian Democratic Union, retained the top spot in Saxony Anhalt, it lost to the Green Party in Baden-Wuerttemberg.
The AfD is a far-right nationalist party that is highly critical of Merkel’s approach to Europe’s migration crisis.
The elections have been seen as a test of Mrs Merkel’s refugee policy.
“They expect us finally to be the opposition that there hasn’t been”.
“What an fantastic evening”, Andre Poggenburg, the AfD leader in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, said in a fiery speech in the state capital Magdeburg, calling the result “brilliant”.
The Social Democrats took Rhineland-Palatinate beating the CDU.
However, the CDU finished several percentage points behind the popular incumbents’ parties in both states and dropped 12 percentage points to a record-low result in Baden-Wuerttemberg, with 27 percent support.
Other parties are extremely unlikely to share power with the AfD but the party’s increased presence will make their own efforts at building coalitions more complicated. Thus whilst the results may auger great difficulties for her party in the years ahead, they may not be so catastrophic for Merkel personally. But she still looks set to run for a fourth successive term as chancellor, with no real challenger for the right to lead her party into next year’s federal election.
Addressing a press conference in Berlin after meeting her party leaders to discuss the outcome of the elections Monday, Merkel said: “Yesterday [Sunday] was a hard day for the Christian Democratic Union”.
As dissent grew over her stance, the AfD, formed in February 2013, has capitalised on the darkening mood in the course of the refugee crisis and gained remarkable support over the past months.
Merkel herself described AfD as a “party that does not bring cohesion in society and offers no appropriate solutions to problems, but only stokes prejudices and divisions”.
Now AfD has seats in half of Germany’s legislatures and in the European Parliament.
The AfD wants restrictions on political asylum, stronger enforcement of existing laws – including deportations of refugees who don’t qualify for asylum – and demands that the government “protect the national identity”, according to a resolution passed at a party convention in November.
According to Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Sunday’s elections have changed Germany.
Andreas Kluth, Berlin bureau chief of The Economist, told CNBC on Monday that “Angela Merkel and her refugee policy per se did not lose”.
And Julia Kloeckner, who some believed could be the successor to Merkel, failed to help the CDU to a win in Rhineland-Palatinate.
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“The result hopefully will be that the CDU and (their Bavarian allies) will realize that this permanent quarreling doesn’t help them”, Vice Chancellor Gabriel said.
