The state election in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern comes a year to the day after Merkel’s government accepted thousands of refugees stranded at Budapest train station – the consequences of which have been analysed across the German media in the past fortnight.
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Germany’s anti-immigrant “Alternative for Deutschland” party – or AfD – is expected to make huge gains in a key state election on Sunday.
Merkel has lobbied hard in the state with a get-out-and-vote effort, anxious that a low turnout could boost the AfD at the cost of traditional parties, including her CDU and the Social Democrats, who now run the state.
In the sprawling farming and coastal state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania – Germany’s poorest and least populous – the issue of refugees and integration has also become the deciding factor for one in three voters.
A humiliating state election defeat for Angela Merkel in her own backyard on Sunday and another drubbing that looms in two weeks in Berlin are casting an ominous shadow over the chancellor’s hopes of winning-or even running-for a fourth term in 2017.
“A million refugees have come here”.
But the “migration policy has sparked a feeling of insecurity among the people”, he said.
“We tell them “we will manage this” but they want to know how”, he said, in reference to Merkel’s “We can do it” rallying cry.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel listens to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s speech during the opening ceremony of the G20 Summit at the International Expo Center in Hangzhou on September 4, 2016.
Merkel’s approval rating has plunged to a five-year low of 45 percent, down from 67 percent a year ago, due to spreading disenchantment with her open-door policies on refugees.
“We took nothing away from people here”.
The daughter of late, Hungarian-born U.S. Congressman Tom Lantos, says she is returning a distinguished state award to Hungary to protest the bestowing of the same award to journalist and writer Zsolt Bayer who has.
Earlier this year, the CDU had looked like the party most likely to be tasked with forming the next government in the state. Both parties lost support compared with the last state election in 2011, when they polled 35.6 and 23 percent, respectively.
A new survey has revealed that if the national election were held next week, the AfD would win 12 per cent of the vote – making it the third largest party in Germany.
But she also defended her decision to welcome so many migrants into Germany – 1.1million past year – while denying that her decision cut funding for the German public. They also fight against most of the Islamic culture they claim “is taking over Western culture”.
“No”, she said, adding that she’d do the same again.
The German chancellor’s CDU was supported by only 19.8% of those who voted, according to the exit polls.
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“She is, in people’s perception, personally responsible for the border opening, and she has to deal with that”, political science professor Karl-Rudolf Korte told ZDF television.
