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. “Those who voted for the AfD were sending a message of protest”.
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Mecklenburg is home to few foreigners, but Merkel acknowledged that migrant policy was a dominant theme. CSU Secretary General Andreas Scheuer spelt out that what was now needed was a cap on refugee numbers and better integration and repatriation of failed asylum seekers.
“This was a dark day for Merkel”, Thomas Jaeger, a political scientist at Cologne University, told Reuters. However, it didn’t pose any immediate threat to the 62-year-old Merkel, Germany’s leader since 2005.
She said that, as chancellor and party chief, “of course I am also responsible” but insisted that opening the borders to a mass influx of refugees and migrants a year ago was the right decision.
Merkel on Monday added that she was aware that her policy on migration caused a decline in her popularity. Leader Frauke Petry attacked Merkel’s party for saying that “they haven’t done anything wrong. This put her in her place”.
The ruling CDU finished third while the SDP took the most votes. The CDU won 19 percent, down from 23 percent in 2011, and its worst result ever in the state, ARD TV said.
The far-left Left Party won 12.5pc, down from 18.4pc five years ago, while the pro-environment Greens won 5pc, down from 8.7pc. The far-right NPD was knocked out of the state assembly, falling below the 5 percent threshold for the first time since 2006 with 3.5 percent, down from 6 percent in 2011.
On Sunday, AfD won voters from across the political spectrum to take 20.8 percent of votes, its second-best result yet. The SPD, which could also form a coalition with the Left Party, said it was leaving its options open.
Voters already punished Merkel in three state elections in March, voting in droves for the AfD and rejecting Merkel’s Christian Democrats.
The AfD was founded in 2013 as a eurosceptic party advocating a return to the Deutschmark, but it has since shifted to become a mainly anti-immigration and Islamophobic party. For the past 10 years Mecklenburg-Vorpommern was governed by a coalition between the centre-right CDU and centre-left SPD.
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Merkel, mulling a bid for a fourth term as chancellor, made a last-minute campaign appearance on Saturday in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, warning against the politics of “angst” offered by AfD with its virulent anti-refugee stance.
