Polls point to heavy losses for Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) in the vote for the Berlin city assembly, which means the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) may be able to ditch them from their current coalition.
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Merkel’s CDU came in second with 17 percent of the votes in Berlin, behind the Social Democrats (SPD) with 22 percent.
While it’s true the new right Alternative for Germany party rose on an anti-immigrant platform from not existing in the last election to 14 percent of the vote in its first Berlin election, 70 percent of Sunday’s vote went for parties that back Merkel’s welcoming approach.
Members of Merkel’s own party are concerned that she has lost control of the country’s migration levels following the biggest refugee crisis in Europe since the Second World War.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) party has suffered a historic defeat in state elections in Berlin.
The vote comes two weeks after Merkel’s CDU was beaten into third place in the eastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania by the AfD, in which the chancellor’s decision to open Germany’s borders to migrants past year featured prominently.
The SPD, Merkel’s junior coalition partner at the national level, wants to form a coalition with the Greens and possibly the radical Left party in the city-state of Berlin.
Frank Henkel, the CDU’s top Berlin candidate, described the results as “a black day for the people’s parties”.
She said though voters were dealing with many local issues, she conceded that her decision to open the borders to hundreds of thousands of migrants was also a factor, and “I take responsibility as party leader and chancellor”. The CDU dropped 5.7 percent, marking its worst performance in the capital since German reunification, public broadcaster ARD reported.
The Greens won 15.2 percent of the Berlin vote, down two percentage points from 2011.
The head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Josef Schuster, told the German news media on Sunday that the results were worrying. The party, which was founded in 2013, as an anti-euro movement, has adopted an anti-Islam and anti-migrant discourse with the arrival in Germany of a million asylum-seekers in 2015.
However, the results in Berlin, which is one of the country’s 16 federal states, will be seen as highly significant.
The result compounds Ms Merkel’s problems after a rout in the eastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern two weeks ago triggered calls from her conservative allies in Bavaria to toughen up her migrant policy.
“From zero to double digits, that’s unique for Berlin”.
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Recent polls show national AfD support exceeding 10 percent and the party is likely to enter the federal parliament in a general election next year.
