On Sunday, the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania held state elections, with AfD winning 21 percent of the vote, knocking Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) party into third place with 19 percent.
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Merkels refugee policies were a prominent issue in the campaign for Sundays election, which came a year to the day after she made a decision to let in migrants from Hungary setting off the peak of last years influx.
“We have wasted a great deal of time with unnecessary arguments”, he said, arguing that Merkel had been guilty of “simply repeating “we will manage it” without doing it as well”.
According to Sebastian Friederich, a political commentator who has studied the AfD, “traditional coalition governments can’t win any more”.
The region is sparsely populated, but the vote was symbolically significant because Merkel has her parliamentary constituency there and it was the first of five regional ballots before a national election expected next September.
The deputy leader of the AfD, Beatrix von Storch, told Sky News that the exit poll result would be a “huge success” for her party, which was only founded three years ago.
Germany has taken in nearly 1 million refugees, many of them Muslims fleeing war in the Middle East, over the past year.
However, the surging refugee crisis and Angela Merkel’s decision to host 140,910 asylum applicants in 2015, the largest number in Europe, has led to a bitter debate over the wisdom of the strategy.
While Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) garnered its worst ever score in elections to the parliament in state capital Schwerin, the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) maintained top place with over 30 percent.
“They don’t have another choice but to let her finish her legal commissions”, added Berenberg Bank economist Holger Schmieding. “The issue of integration will play a major role, as will the repatriation of refugees without a permit of stay”, Merkel said.
The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania suffered a stinging backlash on Sunday as the upstart opposition right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party entered its ninth regional assembly since 2013.
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The AfD is also making gains nationwide, a new poll showed on Sunday. “If the AfD beats the CDU again in two weeks in Berlin, things could get ugly fast”.
