For the past 10 years, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern has been governed in a “grand coalition” between the SPD and CDU, mirroring the current power structure at federal level.
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However, Ms. Merkel said that she stands by her policies, saying decisions taken by her government were still correct.
The nationalist, anti-migrant Alternative for Germany finished in second place, with 21 percent of the vote, behind the center-left Social Democrats, with nearly 31 percent.
Hopefully we will have another one in a year’s time in Berlin. While polls this year have shown her popularity slipping from stellar to merely solid, there is no obvious conservative alternative and her bloc is ahead nationally. “Maybe today is the beginning of the end of Angela Merkel”, said Leif-Erik Holm, the AFD’s main candidate in the state. Both parties lost support compared with the last state election in 2011, when they polled 35.6 and 23 percent, respectively.
Chancellor Angela Merkel suffered a damaging defeat on Sunday as Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) beat her conservatives in a key regional election.
Although Merkel already adjusted migrant policies over the past year, she can’t make a clean break from her overall approach because “that wouldn’t be credible”, political science professor Klaus Schroeder told N24 television.
“The situation is highly threatening for the union”, Seehofer said, adding that people don’t want “this Berlin policy”.
Chancellor Merkel is perceived to be paying a dear price for her welcoming policy towards refugees, with Germany opening its doors to 1.1 million asylum seekers in 2015.
If the national election were held next week, the AfD would win 12 percent of the vote, making it the third-largest party in Germany, according to a poll conducted by the Emnid institute for the Bild newspaper and published on Sunday.
Merkel’s SPD vice chancellor, Sigmar Gabriel, hailed the result as a triumph and, taking a shot at Merkel’s refugee crisis mantra, charged that “it’s not good enough to just say “we can do it” and leave the work to others”. Merkel was first appointed as Chancellor in November 2005 and is serving her third term.
The AfD is polling at 12 percent on national level and it is expected to be the first far-right party to enter the Bundestag since 1945.
The AfD was founded in 2013 as a eurosceptic party that advocated a return to the Deutschmark, but it has since shifted to become a mainly anti-immigration and Islamophobic party.
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Bloomberg describes Merkel’s home state as “an outlier”, with 9 percent unemployment – another reason voters may have supported the AfD.
