Seehofer, Premier of the southern state of Bavaria, and the Bavarian-based allies of Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) in the national parliament, on Tuesday in Berlin attributed the Sunday’s “disastrous” outcome in the eastern German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern election result to Merkel’s liberal refugee policy.
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“This result, and the strong performance of AfD, is bitter for many, for everyone in our party”, said Peter Tauber, the general secretary of the Christian Democrats.
Although she won praise at first, the optimism has given way to fears over how Europe’s biggest economy will manage to integrate the million people who arrived previous year alone.
In part due to its economic weakness and low population density, the region was assigned fewer refugees than all but two of Germany’s 16 other Länder; 23,080 asylum seekers were registered in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in 2015, roughly a quarter of those assigned to similarly sized Hesse. Meanwhile Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos called on interior ministers to “meet their obligations” in this respect.
Speaking during a news conference at the G20 summit in China, Merkel said: “All of us now have to think about how we can earn their trust back, and of course I should be the first one to do that”.
In the sprawling farming and coastal state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania – Germany’s poorest and least populous – the issue of refugees and integration has also become the deciding factor for one in three voters. The centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) – which now heads a grand coalition with the CDU as its junior partner – is projected to remain the strongest party at 30.4 per cent.
That, she said, meant not just refugee issues, but economic issues and questions of “social cohesion” too.
“This is a result to make us proud”, Leif-Erik Holm, the AfD’s candidate for state premier, said on ARD.
“A million refugees have come here”.
“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.
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The state has been run for the past decade by the parties that now govern Germany. AfD won 21% of the total votes putting Christian Democrats (19%) at third place. “By far the most likely scenario remains that Merkel will run again at the next federal election in September 2017 – and will remain chancellor thereafter”.
