A year before the national election, the Berlin result has deepened rifts in her conservative camp, with her CDU and their Bavarian allies – the Christian Social Union (CSU) – blaming each other within minutes of Sunday’s results.
Advertisement
Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) were ousted from the state governing coalition with the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD), just weeks after losing an election in another state. They now have a support rating of 14.1 percent, lining them up to enter Berlin’s state parliament for the first time. The party, known as AfD, entered its 10th state parliament Sunday with 14.2 percent of the vote.
Germany, the biggest European Union economy, took in one million asylum seekers past year, and over 70,000 of them came to Berlin, with thousands still housed in the cavernous hangars of the Nazi-built former Tempelhof airport.
Her critics say the administration has not made sufficient contribution to efforts for ending the crises in Syria and Iraq, which are among the main causes of the refugee influx in Europe.
Merkel’s lengthy statement on her refugee policy came ahead of another three state elections and a federal election next year.
But she said she recognized that Germans did not want the country to face uncontrolled migration, saying that it was also her goal to head off unregulated flows of people into the nation.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party on Monday digested another stinging poll loss, in Berlin state elections, and the relentless rise of the right-wing populist AfD which rails against her liberal refugee policy.
Markus Soeder, finance minister from the CDU’s sister party CSU, said the vote, which was the worst ever result in Berlin for the CDU party was a “massive wake-up call”, that she should impose stricter limits on migration.
The SPD won 22.8 percent of the vote, dropping 5.5 percent, while the CDU won 17.8 percent, down 5.6 percent, ARD public television reported. “The CDU and I can not go along with that”.
The anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) gained from a popular backlash over Merkel’s decision a year ago to keep German borders open for refugees.
“Not every refugee came to our country with good intentions”, she said.
The Left, which traces its roots partly to the former East German communists, was the victor among established parties, rising about four percentage points to nearly 16 percent to take third place.
Advertisement
AfD was set up by a group disgruntled by Merkel’s eurozone crisis management – most notably the Greek bailouts – but it grew into a more nationalist party that strongly opposed rising immigration levels, particularly of people from Muslim countries. Mayor Michael Mueller will extend his party’s 15-year-old rule in Germany’s biggest city, possibly together with the Left and the Greens.
