The Greens and the anti-capitalist Left Party each took 16.5 per cent, while the pro-business Free Democrats were poised to return to the Berlin city assembly with 6.5 per cent, according to the exit polls.
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The AfD, now running as high as 15% in national polls, is gathering momentum to gain its first seats in national parliament in the general elections next year.
The party is expected to be ousted from the state governing coalition with the centre-left Social Democrats.
Germany took in one million asylum seekers past year, and over 70,000 of them came to Berlin, with many housed in the cavernous hangars of the Nazi-built former Tempelhof airport, once the hub for the Cold War-era Berlin airlift.
Nonetheless, the vote marked another milestone for the upstart AfD, which has campaigned on a xenophobic platform, similar to France’s National Front or far-right populists in Austria and the Netherlands, and gained support especially in Berlin’s poor eastern fringe districts.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives look set to suffer losses Sunday in a Berlin city vote – the second electoral blow within two weeks – as a growing number of voters are expected to express their unease with her refugee-friendly policy.
The results have led many German political pundits to estimate that the new Berlin coalition will consist of the Socialists, the Greens and the Left party, an outcome that will likely provide more money for migrants and confirm Berlin as one of the most left-wing cities in Germany.
Georg Pazderski, AfD’s leading candidate in the Berlin elections, said the result was a sign of things to come.
Ms. Merkel has pushed legislation through parliament in recent months to tighten asylum rules and sought to speed deportations of rejected asylum seekers.
As no party was able to win an outright majority, the SPD will now form a new regional coalition government. Merkel hasn’t decided if she will run for a fourth term as chancellor.
Given a dearth of options in her party, however, she is still the most likely candidate.
Berlin became a national laughing stock for a grand airport project that is now 5 years behind schedule and 3 times over budget.
It campaigned hard against the chancellor’s decision a year ago to allow more than 1 million migrants, a lot of them without immigration documents, into the country.
Casting his ballot early on Sunday, police officer Tobias Ludley, 27, said he anxious about indebted Berlin’s cash-strapped public services, as well as its “little building site”, the BER.
The AfD, founded in 2013 as an anti-euro party, now polls nationally at between 11 and 14 per cent.
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67% of Berlin’s 2,5 million eligible voters turned out on Sunday.
