Since the local CDU in both Rhineland-Palatinate and Baden-Württemberg had distanced itself from Mrs Merkel’s policy, and since these elections were won by the centre-left SPD and by the Greens respectively (both of which supported a more liberal approach to refugees) it is hard to pin the CDU’s relatively poor showing on the chancellor or her approach to migration.
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Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) took a beating and lost voter support in all three states.
“That we need a European solution wasn’t called into question today”, Merkel said after a meeting of the CDU’s leadership in the German capital.
“The goal must be a common, sustainable European solution that leads to a tangible reduction of the number of refugees in all [EU] member states”, Seibert said, as stated by the AFP.
The Alternative for Germany, to give the party its full name, has shaken up the country’s consensus-driven politics with headline-grabbing policies that include telling Germans to have more children to avoid the need for immigration.
German voters cast their ballots on Sunday in the southwestern states of Baden-Wuerttemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate as well as eastern Saxony-Anhalt to elect three new regional parliaments, Xinhua reported.
The right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD), which takes a hard line on immigration, took around a quarter of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, becoming the second biggest party there, and also made strong gains in the other two states.
Merkel alarmed many European leaders last week by gambling on a last-minute draft deal with Turkey to stop the migrant flow, and must win their support at a summit later this week to cement the controversial plan.
Germany, which previous year recorded thousands of asylum seekers arriving each day, has seen numbers drop significantly since western Balkan states shut down the route used by migrants.
These state polls-the first since Chancellor Angela Merkel opened Germany’s borders to refugees half a year ago-suggest that the country’s political landscape is changing dramatically.
Frauke Petry, the AfD’s co-leader, has said that police must “prevent illegal border crossings, using firearms if necessary”. Merkel’s so-called refugee policy, which in my view is a migration policy, has not been liked by a lot of people.
AfD won 15.1 percent of the vote in Baden-Wuerttemberg and 12.6 percent in Rhineland-Palatinate, official results showed. “The longer fundamentals remain divorced from asset valuations (or, in other words, wealth from income) the more public pressure builds in favour of “de-globalisation” which has been witnessed in the rise of populist parties bent more on protectionism and nationalist agendas”, its rate strategists write.
Gero Neugebauer, political scientist at Berlin Free University: “The AfD is a party that combines right populist, national conservatives, economist liberals and so far one can see if this party will be strong enough to master all the, let me say, challenges they await”.
Merkel acknowledged Monday that in the eyes of many voters, her government could not deliver a satisfactory solution to the refugee crisis so far.
It now has its sights set on entering the national parliament in an election expected late next year.
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The CDU’s leader in Saxony-Anhalt pointed the finger squarely at Merkel for his party’s losses.
