Responding to the preliminary results from the weekend vote, Merkel – who is in China at the G20 summit – told reporters she was “dissatisfied with the outcome of the elections”.
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(AP Photo/Michael Sohn). Frauke Petry, chairwoman of the German right-populist AfD (Alternative for Germany) party, stands with closed eyes after a news conference about yesterday’s state election in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania in Berlin, Germany, .
The AfD has capitalised on such fears, especially since a spate of sexual assaults blamed on North African men on New Year’s Eve, and a series of bloody attacks this summer, some claimed by the Islamic State group. Angela Merkel said the asylum seekers had “shamed the country that welcomed them”, but rejected calls to change her policies, arguing those fleeing persecution and war have a right to be protected. “But I believe the fundamental decisions made in the past months are the right decisions”.
However, AfD candidate Lief-Erik Holm said: “The icing on the cake is that we have left Merkel’s CDU behind us”.
Sunday’s election in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern was seen as symbolically important as it was in Merkel’s home constituency.
After the AfD party replaced Merkel’s Christian Democrats the second-strongest party in the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern election, a prominent member of the country’s Jewish community said Monday that the rise of the right-wing party in Germany as “nightmare”.
The voting on Sunday was the first of five regional ballots to be held before the general election in Germany in 2017.
Merkel has insisted that “we will manage” the crisis.
The Union party is a bloc of CDU and its Bavarian sister party Christian Social Union (CSU).
She admitted that “many people do not have our confidence regarding the refugee question”.
Charlotte Knobloch, former Head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said that its eurosceptic, anti-migrant message propelled it into third place in national opinion polls, likely to enter the Bundestag parliament after a general election next year. She hasn’t yet declared whether she will seek a fourth term next year, but there’s no obvious alternative.
At national level, the AfD is now polling at 14 percent, a gain of 10 points in the year since Merkel threw open German borders to a mass influx of asylum seekers.
“This ignorance is exemplary”, she said.
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“Apparently it is not clear to many voters, or they accept this, that AfD doesn’t distance itself clearly from the far-right spectrum either in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania or nationally”. “If the AFD beats the CDU again in two weeks in Berlin, things could get ugly fast”, – Gero Neugebauer, political scientist at Berlin’s Free University.
