A nationalist, anti-immigration party performed strongly in a German state election Sunday in the region where Chancellor Angela Merkel has her political base, overtaking her conservative party to take second place amid discontent with her migrant policies, projections indicated Sunday.
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She added that “the issue of integration will play a huge role in that, and the question of the repatriation of refugees who have no residence permit here”. We will make them as carefully and consistently as we can.
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.
The result is seen as Mrs Merkel’s fault alone she continues to ignore public opinion and insists that there will be no U-turn on her asylum policy.
AfD Chairwoman Frauke Petry visits the election party after first results gave the AfD 21.5 per cent of the vote in state elections on September 4, 2016.
“I am the party leader, I am the chancellor – you can’t separate those in people’s eyes, so I am of course responsible too” for the result, Merkel said.
The AfD has targeted Merkel’s CDU and the SPD ever since the chancellor decided a year ago to keep Germany’s borders open to refugees arriving from war zones such as Syria and Iraq via Hungary and Austria.
A new poll out on Friday showed that her approval levels have slumped to their lowest for five years.
A humiliating state election defeat for Angela Merkel in her own backyard on Sunday and another drubbing that looms in two weeks in Berlin are casting an ominous shadow over the chancellor’s hopes of winning-or even running-for a fourth term in 2017.
The northeast German state is the poorest in Germany and home to Mrs. Merkel’s electoral district.
The defeat comes at a crucial time for Merkel, as she needs to deal with the UK’s decision to leave the European Union, a fragile migration deal with Turkey, and an increasingly assertive Russian Federation at Europe’s doorstep.
The single biggest factor in her favour, analysts say, is the lack of a political rival strong enough to challenge her. That helped push the far-right National Democratic Party out of its last state legislature.
There’s no realistic prospect at present of AfD going into government, and other parties won’t deal with it.
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The AfD was founded in 2013 at the height of Europe’s sovereign debt crisis on an anti-euro platform, but it has now firmly repositioned itself as a racist, fear-mongering group. The elections took place in the small coastal state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern where AfD beat Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats by a narrow margin.
