Although AfD has performed strongly in several other regional elections, most notably coming in second with 24% of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt in March, it’s an unprecedented moment in modern German politics that the CDU is set to finish behind a party so far to its right on most issues. The Social Democrats and Christian Democratic Union have governed the state for 10 years.
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(Christian Charisius/dpa via AP). The nationalist, anti-immigration party.
“Angela Merkel defeats herself”, announced populist leader Frauke Petry on television Monday morning, commenting on the success of her AfD party in Mecklenburg that, in her view, constitutes a personal defeat for the Chancellor. However, the result didn’t pose any immediate threat to Merkel, 62, Germany’s leader since 2005. Merkel conceded the outcome was “almost entirely about federal political issues”.
The SDP – which had topped the vote in the last polls in 2011 – meanwhile, were predicted to win around 28 per cent at the elections, two weeks before capital Berlin holds its state polls.
State Governor Erwin Sellering now will have to decide with which party to share power – the Christian Democrats or the Left Party. Mrs Merkel’s constituency is in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania. Germany took in more than one million people, though the inflow has fallen sharply in recent months due to tighter European border controls and a repatriation deal with Turkey.
The AfD has capitalized 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.
She added: “We have to protect our borders”.
“This isn’t pretty for us”, said Michael Grosse-Broemer, one of Merkel’s top deputies in parliament in Berlin in a ZDF TV interview.
The Alternative for Germany obtained about 22 percent in its first bid for seats in the regional parliament of Mecklenburg-Western Vorpommern, partial results show. He accused her conservatives of being too slow to respond to the migrant crisis.
“The icing on the cake is that we have left Merkel’s CDU behind us”, Leif-Erik Holm said.
The latest blow for Angela Merkel’s party was this weekend when her supporters barely made it on the third place.
The election was won by the centre-left SPD, but with a reduced score of 30 percent.
Merkel’s bloc leads national polls, although her own popularity ratings have dropped from stellar to respectable. She has no obvious rival or successor.
AfD polls between 11 and 14 percent nationally and appears strongest in the ex-communist east.
In Sunday’s election, Angela Merkel’s “catastrophic immigration policy” overshadowed all other policy areas, Petry said. “They just didn’t explain their policies”.
“It’s definitely a slap in the face for her and her policies”, said Jaeger. “It is not just ignorance”. The Alternative for Deutschland (AFD), a populist, upstart, right-wing party founded only a handful of years before in 2013, wasn’t even the slightest afterthought in the political class of Germany.
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The anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) party made huge gains on September 4 as voters sent a “message of protest” to German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
