While Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) garnered its worst ever score in elections to the parliament in state capital Schwerin, the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) maintained top place with over 30 percent.
Advertisement
HANGZHOU, China German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Monday that G20 countries are working on rules to improve conditions for investment in Africa and added she believed it was urgent for more direct foreign investment to flow to the continent.
According to CSU General Secretary Andreas Scheuer, Seehofer intends to present a comprehensive list of demands for refugee policy at a meeting of top party leaders of the CDU-CSU union and SPD on Sunday.
In spite of the setback, the Social Democrats, led by Erwin Sellering in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, were relieved with the results which will allow a reissuing of its coalition with the Christian Democrats in this state.
Following a spate of sexual assaults blamed on North African men on New Year’s Eve in Germany and a series of a bloody attacks this summer, some of which were claimed by the Daesh terrorist group, the mood of most Germans has darkened, with concerns growing stronger about how to integrate the newcomers.
At the CDU party congress in 2015 “we said that not even a country like Germany can receive such a large number of refugees each year”, Merkel said.
Merkel, however, remains convinced that this policy was “right from the start”.
Hopefully we will have another one in a year’s time in Berlin.
“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. The big test case ahead of the 2017 national elections will be next year’s elections in North Rhine Westphalia, a state which has more voters than all eastern German states together, Brzeski noted.
Ms Merkel’s refugee policies were a prominent issue in the campaign for the election, which came a year to the day after she made a decision to let in migrants who were waiting in Hungary to travel to Germany – setting off the peak of last year’s influx.
Merkel said she was “deeply dissatisfied with the outcome of the election”, but pledged to “win back trust” of voters. She hasn’t yet declared whether she will seek a fourth term next year, but there’s no obvious alternative.
“The elections in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern show that the citizens are no longer intimidated by the lip service of the old parties”, AFD party leader Frauke Petry tweeted Sunday.
Advertisement
“The more the people who go to vote, the less the percentage won by some parties that, in my view, have no solution for problems and which are built mainly around a protest – often with hate”, she said.
