Projections late on Sunday night saw the centre-left SPD on 30.5%, the anti-immigration AfD on 20.9%, and the chancellor’s centre-right CDU suffering its all-time lowest result in the eastern state, on 19%.
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The xenophobic Alternative for Germany (AfD) clinched around 21 percent in its first bid for seats in the regional parliament of Mecklenburg-Western Vorpommern, results showed after most ballots were counted.
“This was more than a small state election, it was a vote on Merkel”, said news site Spiegel Online, pointing at the “protest storm” in “Merkel’s living room”.
“The only issue voters care about right now is (Merkel’s) irresponsible migrant policies”, said Leif-Erik Holm, the leader of the AfD in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.
Although AfD has performed strongly in several other regional elections, most notably coming 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.
Compared to other parts of Germany, the northeastern state hosts just a small proportion of refugees under a quota system based on states’ income and population – having taken in 25,000 asylum seekers past year.
A year after her controversial decision to let the refugees establish in Germany, Merkel’s popularity dropped significantly. Still, New Years Eve robberies and sexual assaults in Germany blamed largely on foreigners, as well as two attacks in July carried out by asylum-seekers and claimed by the Islamic State group, have fed tensions. She has no obvious rival or successor.
“This result, and the strong performance of AfD, is bitter for many, for everyone in our party”, said Peter Tauber, her Christian Democrats’ general secretary. “Those who voted for the AfD were sending a message of protest”.
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”.
One of Mrs Merkel’s top deputies in Berlin, Michael Grosse-Groehmer, told ZDF: “This isn’t pretty for us”. 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.
She added: “We have to protect our borders”. “But she can deal with it – she has a year”.
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The AfD was founded in 2013 as a eurosceptic party advocating a return to the Deutschmark, but it has since shifted to become a mainly anti-immigration and Islamophobic party. However, Social Democrat premier Erwin Sellering did not confirm Sunday whether he would seek another coalition with CDU. Both parties lost support compared with the last state election in 2011, when they polled 35.6 and 23 percent, respectively.
