German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Monday she accepted her share of responsibility for her conservatives’ drubbing in a Berlin state vote on Sunday when voters punished the party for her refugee-friendly migrant policy.
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The anti-immigrant and anti-EU AfD party came fifth, but its score, of nearly 14 percent, saw it enter the regional assembly for the first time and showed that it is becoming a force to be reckoned with ahead of federal elections due next year.
The election also saw the Pirate Party voted out of state parliament, and the pro-business Free Democratic Party winning 6.7 percent of the vote – enough to bring it back into parliament.
In Berlin, the CDU received only about 18% of the vote, down more than 5 points from the last poll in 2011.
“Berlin continues to stand for social and human decency”, Sigmar Gabriel, the German vice-chancellor and leader of Merkel’s coalition partner, the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) said.
Earlier this month, the AfD defeated Merkel’s CDU in the eastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, managing to win 20.8 percent of the vote and pushing the Christian Democrats into third place.
Never in the history of Berlin – including the history of West Berlin after the Second World war and that of the reunited city after the fall of the Berlin Wall – had the CDU experienced such a debacle.
The election in the chronically indebted city-state of 3.5 million people was dominated by local issues including poor public services, crumbling school buildings, late trains and a housing shortage, as well as problems in coping with the migrant influx.
The results have led many German political pundits to estimate that the new Berlin coalition will consist of the Socialists, the Greens and the Left party, an outcome that will likely provide more money for migrants and confirm Berlin as one of the most left-wing cities in Germany.
“We see that in many regions of Germany the CDU bases, the party bases, don’t agree with Merkel’s policy any more”, she said.
SPD emerged as the strongest party with around 22% in spite of losing nearly 7% of their voters.
“We are all angry that the AfD got in”, Michael Mueller, Berlin’s mayor and the Social Democrats’ leading candidate, told cheering supporters in the capital.
For his part, the AfD’s Berlin front-man, Georg Pazderski, celebrated the fact that his side had come “from zero to double-digits”.
For the second time in two weeks, voters in Germany gave the CDU a defeat in state elections. But given a dearth of options in her party, she still looks the most likely candidate.
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Voting in the German capital started at 8 a.m. and some 2.5 million people are eligible to decide who should represent them in the Berlin city assembly.
