German Chancellor Angela Merkel came under fresh fire over her open-door refugee policy Monday after her party suffered a humiliating defeat against an upstart anti-migrant populist party in her home state.
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Merkel, chancellor for almost 11 years, on Monday took responsibility for the state election result but stood by her migrant policy.
However, Ms. Merkel said that she stands by her policies, saying decisions taken by her government were still correct.
The significant issues of integration and the deportation of failed asylum seekers were mentioned by Ms. Merkel who has turned more hard line on the migrant crisis in recent weeks claiming that she does not want to see a repeat of a year ago.
AfD co-chief Beatrix von Storch, with her eyes on national elections next year, hailed the shock outcome as “the beginning of the end of the Merkel era”, while Bild daily labelled the result as another “slap across the face” for the chancellor. It already has deputies in eight other state legislatures and is likely to enter the national parliament after next year’s general election.
“If that’s the best person they have to offer, then that’s just fine by us”, Petry said in an interview in Berlin. However, Social Democrat premier Erwin Sellering did not confirm Sunday whether he would seek another coalition with CDU.
Bloomberg describes Merkel’s home state as “an outlier”, with 9 percent unemployment – another reason voters may have supported the AfD.
According to a survey conducted before the election by polling firm Infratest Dimap, more than a third of voters in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern said the refugee influx would be the key factor in their decision on election day.
“We have to recognize that many people at the moment don’t have sufficient trust in our ability to resolve the issue, even though we’ve made a lot of progress”, Merkel said.
During the Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania election, the party also managed to effectively drive out the far-right ultranationalist National Democratic Party from the local parliament, as a considerable number of NDP supporters chose to vote for AfD, the former failed to make it past the 5-percent barrier.
Her approval ratings fell 22 points to a five-year low at 45 percent in the year since she opened the gates to more than a million refugees, mainly from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, drawn by Germany’s famed prosperity, order and stability.
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New arrivals have slowed drastically after more than 1 million people were registered as asylum-seekers in 2015, and asylum policies have been tightened. But, the northeastern Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania was home to merely 25,000 asylum seekers past year.
