German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Monday she was unhappy about the results of Sunday’s regional election, where her party was relegated to third place behind an anti-immigrant party but added her refugee policies have been right all along.
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The limits are particularly clear in Germany where, because of that country’s history, the AfD has no chance of governing in state or national coalitions, because none of the centre-ground parties will get into bed with it.
The three-year-old Alternative for Germany drew supporters from across the spectrum to finish second with 20.8 percent of votes.
New arrivals in Germany have slowed drastically this year, policies have been tightened and Mecklenburg is home to few foreigners.
Angela Merkel visited the north-eastern state twice in recent days as opinion polls indicated her party was heading for its worst ever performance there.
The next regional election is September 18 in Berlin, where local issues are likely to play a stronger role. Still, New Year’s Eve robberies and sexual assaults in Germany blamed largely on foreigners, as well as two attacks in July carried out by asylum-seekers and claimed by the Islamic State group, have fed tensions.
“What is urgently needed is that there is more direct investment in Africa”, she said. While polls this year have shown her popularity slipping from stellar to merely solid, there is no obvious conservative alternative and her bloc is ahead nationally.
“This isn’t pretty for us”, said Michael Grosse-Broemer, one of Merkel’s top deputies in parliament in Berlin in a ZDF TV interview.
“We have wasted a great deal of time with unnecessary arguments”, he said, arguing that Merkel had been guilty of “simply repeating “we will manage it” without doing it as well”.
Merkel has yet to say whether she will seek a fourth term next year, as is widely expected.
Although Merkel already adjusted migrant policies over the past year, she can’t make a clean break from her overall approach because “that wouldn’t be credible”, political science professor Klaus Schroeder told N24 television. However, the surging refugee crisis and Angela Merkel’s decision to host 140,910 asylum applicants in 2015, the largest number in Europe, has led to a bitter debate over the wisdom of the strategy. It is now the only place in Germany where the far-right National Democratic Party is represented in the state legislature, though polls suggest it is likely to lose its seats with some supporters switching to AfD.
There’s no realistic prospect at present of AfD going into government.
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Germany’s Central Council of Jews voiced satisfaction at that development, but also concern about AfD.
