German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats were beaten into third place by the anti-immigrant and anti-Islam Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in a north-eastern state election on Sunday, TV exit polls showed. That put it behind the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), with 30.6 percent of the vote, and the AfD with 20.8 percent.
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The opposition Left Party – once popular with protest voters – also lost support, slipping about six points to 12.5 percent, and the left-leaning Greens were hovering around the 5 percent mark.
AfD’s win was hailed by French far-right leader Marine Le Pen, who tweeted: “What was impossible yesterday has become possible: the patriots of AfD sweep up the party of Ms Merkel”.
The reason for that is that the voters have not been listened to for a long time, she said, as quoted by Focus media outlet.
The region is sparsely populated, but the vote was symbolically significant because Merkel’s parliamentary constituency is there.
“The key is that we must bring about more security, not just domestic security or protection from crime and terrorism, but also social security”, he said, after the results.
In an interview in the mass-circulation Bild newspaper, Merkel defended her decision to welcome so many migrants fleeing conflict in the Middle East, and denied that the influx had cut funding for the German public.
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. As it stands, the AfD has no realistic chance of going into government. Regardless of the surprise, this is bad news for Merkel and the CDU, who now are fearing a fall of their government coalition after next year’s upcoming elections.
Germany accepted over 1 million refugees in 2015.
The ruling Christian Democrats (CDU) came third in Sunday’s regional elections in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, according to exit polls. In the past, the AFD has called for police to shoot refugees who cross into the country illegally. Still, New Year’s Eve robberies and sexual assaults blamed largely on foreigners, as well as two attacks in July carried out by asylum-seekers and claimed by the Islamic State group, have fed tensions. Merkel’s approval ratings have sunk to a five-year low of 45 percent over the past year, but the chancellor said she would act no differently if faced with the same situation today. “And we saw that particularly in discussions about refugees”. The Alternative for Deutschland (AFD), a populist, upstart, right-wing party founded only a handful of years before in 2013, wasn’t even the slightest afterthought in the political class of Germany.
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Merkel hasn’t announced whether she’ll run for a fourth term next year.
