The right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party clinched nearly 21 percent in its first bid for seats in the regional parliament of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania on Sunday.
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The chancellor says decisions taken by the government over recent months were right.
According to Merkel, many people do not have enough confidence in her Union party to address the hard issues.
“Now the name of the game is to regain trust”, she said.
Meanwhile, Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel, the Social Democrats’ leader and a likely challenger to Merkel next year, underlined his party’s increasing distance from the chancellor as it eyes the national election. It was the first of five regional votes before a national election expected next September.
Raised turnout The AfD, which was formed in 2013, took 20.8 per cent of the vote for the Meckelnburg-Vorpommern state legislature. The AfD, in their first election in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, campaigned hard against Merkel’s policies on refugees.
“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”.
“At national level, the AfD is now polling at 14 percent, a gain of 10 points in the year since Merkel threw open German borders to a mass influx of asylum seekers”. Local AfD leader Leif-Erik Holm told supporters: “Perhaps this is the beginning of the end of Angela Merkel’s chancellorship today”.
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.
With its latest electoral success, the AfD, founded just over three years ago, is now represented in nine out of Germany’s 16 regional parliaments, and is hoping for more gains when the capital Berlin goes to the polls in two weeks.
New arrivals have slowed drastically after more than 1 million people were registered as asylum-seekers in 2015, and asylum policies have been tightened.
The AfD has capitalised on such fears, especially since a spate of sexual assaults blamed on North African men on New Year’s Eve, and a series of bloody attacks this summer, some claimed by the Islamic State group.
The CDU’s general secretary Peter Tauber acknowledged that Sunday’s results were “bitter”, acknowledging that voters “wanted to send a signal of protest”.
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Sunday’s result could make it more hard for Mrs Merkel to bury a festering dispute with the Christian Social Union, the Bavarian arm of her conservative bloc, which has long criticised her decision to open the borders and advocated an annual cap on migrants.
