“This is a proud result that we couldn’t have dreamed of some time ago”, Leif-Erik Holm, the AfD’s top candidate in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, said after the first results came in.
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Merkel, mulling a bid for a fourth term as chancellor, made a last-minute campaign appearance on Saturday in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, warning against the politics of “angst” offered by AfD with its virulent anti-refugee stance.
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.
Alternative for Germany, or AfD, rode public anxiety about last year’s record influx of about 1 million asylum seekers and resistance to Merkel’s defense of open borders to a 21.8 percent share of the vote on Sunday, leaving the CDU in third place with 19 percent.
Yet this would mean that the AfD, which was founded in 2013 as an anti-euro party before morphing into a xenophobic party, would enter yet another regional parliament.
BERLIN (AP) – Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-left deputy is accusing her conservatives of being too slow to respond to the migrant crisis following a state election in which a nationalist, anti-immigration party beat Merkel’s party into third place.
“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.
The chancellor, who is attending the G20 summit in the Chinese city of Hangzhou, did not vote in the polls as her main residence is in Berlin.
With a federal election just a year away, Merkel’s ratings have fallen to a five-year low since opening German borders to about a million migrants last year and then championing a disputed EU-Turkey deal to solve the crisis. While the influx of people seeking asylum has dropped markedly from past year, two Islamist terror attacks by asylum seekers in July further unsettled the public about the security implications of the migrant tide.
“The strong performance of AfD is bitter for many, for everyone in our party”, said CDU secretary general Peter Tauber. The Social Democrats, who have governed the state since 1998, won with 30.6 percent.
In the eastern region of Saxony-Anhalt, Alternative for Germany won 24.2 per cent, its best state result yet.
He said the state government’s positive record took a back seat for many voters “because among a recognizable part, there was an explicit wish to voice displeasure and protest, and we saw that particularly strongly in the discussion about refugees”.
The sparsely populated coastal state is home to relatively few foreigners, but the migrant issue has nevertheless been prominent in the campaign, with AfD using it to attack the governing parties.
Days ahead of Sunday’s vote, Merkel urged the population to reject AfD.
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However, Ms. Merkel said that she stands by her policies, saying decisions taken by her government were still correct.
