“Perhaps today is the beginning of the end of the chancellorship of Angela Merkel”.
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( Britta Pedersen/dpa via AP). What is now a four-party system nationally will probably become a six-party chamber if the liberal Free Democrats also manage to enter, as polls suggest they will.
Both parties got 22% of the votes, meaning that the AfD now has seats in 11 regional parliaments in Germany.
Earlier this year, German Voters punished Merkel in three state elections, voting en masse for the AfD and spurning Merkel’s Christian Democrats.
Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) was relegated to third place behind the right-wing, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in weekend polls in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.
Despite this, a poll released on Friday revealed that Merkel’s approval ratings have fallen to their lowest levels in five years. However, the result didn’t pose any immediate threat to the 62-year-old Merkel, Germany’s leader since 2005.
About one and one-third million voters are eligible to elect a new regional parliament in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, which is also home to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s constituency. Merkel conceded the outcome was “almost entirely about federal political issues”.
Leif-Erik Holm, top candidate of the anti-migrant populists AfD, addresses election results party on Saturday in Schwerin, northeastern Germany.
CDU’s coalition partners have been pushing for new leadership, and Merkel has yet to decide on whether or not she will run for re-election next year.
Much of that transformation is down to Mrs Merkel and her open-door policy towards migrants from the Middle East and Asia.
This may have been a local election but people voted on national issues.
New migrant arrivals in Germany have slowed drastically this year after spiking following Merkel’s September 4, 2015 decision to allow in migrants who had piled up in Hungary. While the influx of people seeking asylum has dropped markedly from a year ago, two Islamist terror attacks by asylum seekers in July further unsettled the public about the security implications of the migrant tide. Still, New Year’s Eve robberies and sexual assaults 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.
Sunday’s result could make it more hard for Merkel to bury a festering dispute with the Christian Social Union, the Bavarian arm of her conservative bloc, which has long criticized her decision to open the borders and advocated an annual cap on migrants. “Nevertheless I still hold though that the decisions, as they were made, were the right ones”. “The refugee question was decisive”.
Days ahead of Sunday’s vote, Merkel urged the population to reject AfD. Merkel will also defer any announcement until the CDU agrees on a candidacy with its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, he said.
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He accused her conservatives of being too slow to respond to the migrant crisis.
