Chancellor Angela Merkel pledged Monday to win back voters’ trust after a nationalist, anti-immigration party beat her conservatives in a state election in the region where she has her political base.
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Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union finished third in the election for Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania’s state legislature, behind the three-year-old Alternative for Germany, or AfD.
An anti-immigrant party in Germany could get more votes than previously expected at state polls Sunday.
Merkel has stuck to her insistence that “we will manage” the refugee crisis, but has acknowledged there is “a very contentious mood”.
Calling it a “proud result”, Leif-Erik Holm, AfD’s lead candidate said: “And the cream of the cake is that we have left Merkel’s CDU behind us. maybe that is the beginning of the end of Merkel’s time as chancellor”.
In the state election in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern on Sunday, the CDU had only become the third strongest political force, achieving the worst result in their history in the state.
Although the former Communist state is Germany’s poorest and least populous, it carries a symbolic meaning as it is home to Merkel’s constituency Stralsund.
Merkel’s refugee policies were a prominent issue in the campaign for Sunday’s election, which came a year to the day after she made a decision to let migrants who were waiting in Hungary travel to Germany, setting off the peak of last year’s influx. Merkel also said that the G20 leaders had extensive talks about fighting climate change and trade issues.
The chancellor, whose towering approval ratings had long carried her party to victories at the polls over the last 11 years, has suddenly turned into a liability amid a frightening fall in support. In the past, the AFD has called for police to shoot refugees who cross into the country illegally.
“We now have a rapidly falling number of arriving refugees”, she said, as Europe’s top economy expects a total of 300,000 arrivals this year.
Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere, a fellow Christian Democrat, rejected criticism from some in the CDU’s Christian Social Union (CSU) sister party that Merkel’s refugee policy was responsible for the rise of the AfD party. She urged voters to look beyond divisive campaign slogans and consider the policies of the current centre-right coalition that had halved unemployment and pumped up tourism in the northeastern coastal state.
Merkel took responsibility for the result and said a failure to convince many concerned citizens about the government’s refugee policy played a role.
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“I’m pretty sure that she and the CDU will wake up to some headaches tomorrow”, Carsten Nickel, an analyst for Teneo Intelligence in Brussels, said by phone.
