She acknowledged her liberal migrant policy contributed to a humiliating state election rout last Sunday, where her CDU finished third with just 19 percent and for a first time behind the surging anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.
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The Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU), the coalition partner of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), has announced new migrant measures such as prioritising migrants from societies with pro-Western Christian values.
He threatened to skip the CDU’s annual party congress in December – an unprecedented blow to the usual unity of the conservative bloc nine months before next September’s election.
“That’s only going to make the AfD stronger”, he told Der Spiegel magazine ahead of a two-day meeting of CSU leaders to Saturday.
Even though Merkel’s CDU and Seehofer’s CSU are sister parties linked as a single conservative bloc in parliament, the CSU has firmly demanded that Merkel introduce upper limits on the number of refugees after more than one million arrived past year.
And Sunday’s regional election hammering in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern has prompted speculation in Germany that she may now not stand for a fourth term. The party – which has fervently attacked Merkel’s liberal stance on refugees that welcomed a million asylum seekers into the EU’s top economy past year – plans to present the paper, seen by AFP and widely reported on in Germany, at a two-day party meeting starting Friday.
Merkel has repeatedly ruled out such a migrant cap. But he added: “The CDU is not our political opponent”. Her popularity has waned in the a year ago due to her handling of the migrant crisis.
Herrmann spoke out in favour of a legally binding limit on the number of migrants allowed to enter Germany and the abolition of dual citizenship, a key demand included in a five-page paper approved by CSU leaders over the weekend. The Left party and the AfD would each win about 15 percent of the vote, the poll showed.
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“There are political issues that one can see coming but don’t really register with people at that certain moment”, Merkel said in a recent interview, blaming failure to act sooner for the unrest regarding the refugees.
