Projections following yesterday’s election showed the SPD comfortably in front with 30.5 per cent of the vote, followed by AfD on 21 per cent and the CDU on 19 per cent.
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Addressing assistants, local AfD leader Leif-Erik Holm said: “Maybe this is the start of ending of Angela Merkel’s chancellorship today”.
It is, however, the state where Merkel has her parliamentary constituency, and Sunday’s vote was the first of five regional votes before a national election a bit more than a year away.
It is now the only place in Germany where the far-right National Democratic Party is represented in the state legislature, though polls suggest it is likely to lose its seats with some supporters switching to AfD. She stressed that “I am deeply dissatisfied with the outcome of the election”, conceding that it had been dominated by the influx of 1 million asylum seekers past year and the question of how to integrate them in society.
The SPD leader and vice-chancellor, Sigmar Gabriel, has systematically attacked Merkel’s motto of “we can do it” on refugees.
“The strong performance of AfD is bitter for many, for everyone in our party”, said Peter Tauber, CDU’s secretary general, according to BBC.
“Many people do not have our confidence regarding the refugee question”, Merkel said, adding that while she stands behind her government’s policies on how to handle the refugees “we still have to do a lot to regain our [party’s] confidence”.
Germany accepted over 1 million refugees in 2015. “There is money for them, but no money to bring pensions in the east to the same levels as those of the west”, he said, referring to the lower retirement payments that residents of former communist states receive compared with those in the west.
In fact, Sunday’s vote came a year to the day after Merkel announced Germany would keep allowing in migrants who were bottlenecking in Hungary, which sealed its borders last year as the number of asylum seekers soared.
A lot of them have already made a decision to abandon the state, preferring to head “where there are jobs, people and shops”, said Frieder Weinhold, CDU candidate.
New arrivals in Germany have slowed drastically this year, policies have been tightened and Mecklenburg is home to few foreigners.
AfD was only formally founded in April 2013, yet it defeated the CDU in the German chancellor’s home state. Gabriel said Monday that “we have to do it too” and that “we have wasted a great deal of time with unnecessary arguments”.
Ahead of Sunday’s vote, Merkel had urged the population to reject the populists.
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Merkel, who was attending a G20 summit in the Chinese city of Hangzhou, was due to discuss the outcome with her party in a teleconference on Monday.
