VOTERS punished Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives in three German regional elections on Sunday, giving a thumbs-down to her open-door refugee policy and turning in droves to the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD).
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The populist Alternative for Germany, which focused its campaign on opposition to Merkel’s refugee policy, won 23% of the vote in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt according to initial projections based on exit polls released by public broadcaster ARD. In all three states, the results were set to leave the outgoing coalition governments short of a majority – forcing regional leaders to search for new partners.
Ms Merkel acknowledged that Sunday’s three state elections, which produced painful losses for her conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), had been dominated by the migrant issue.
Mario Ohoven, president of the BVMW Mittelstand association, said the AfD’s success should trigger government policy changes, adding that if Merkel stuck to her current refugee stance, the right-wing populist movement would keep growing.
“Domestically, we are committed to easing the integration of people who have sought protection here who have been taken in”, he said.
Most damaging of all for Mrs Merkel, the far-Right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party stormed to its best election results ever on a campaign that focused nearly exclusively on an anti-migrant message.
“We saw on New Year’s Eve what parallel societies look like, and that influenced a great many people in Saxony-Anhalt”, he said.
And the CDU’s leader in Saxony-Anhalt pointed the finger squarely at Merkel for his party’s losses.
The growth of a hard right and Eurosceptic party in the AfD in Germany, which is the European state most central to the EU project, represents the possibility of the EU losing support among sections of the German populace.
Germany accepted around one million refugees in 2015, by far the most of any European nation.
A string of election victories by an anti-refugee political party will not change the German government’s policies on taking in migrants from the Middle East and North Africa, an official said.
Neugebauer said “doubts will persist in parts of her own party” over Merkel’s approach. In Rhineland-Palatinate, a state the CDU had hoped to prise from the hands of the SPD and the Greens, the governance stayed the same.
The CDU may have been hurt by the fact their candidates in Baden-Wuerttemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate last month called for Germany to impose daily refugee quotas – something Merkel opposes but which neighboring Austria has since put in place.
The Green-led coalition now in power won the election. But after Sunday’s results, “a discussion will start in the CDU as to whether it’s worth agitating against Merkel on refugee policy – and it won’t happen, because they know they will lose”.
The patience Merkel is asking for seems to be gone among many of her allies, who called for the chancellor to back down for the good of her party.
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Germany’s next national election is due in late 2017.
