He said the state election disaster was a result of failing to draw the right conclusions after losses in other regional votes this year. However, it has no chance of governing in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern since the other parties have said they would not form a coalition with the party.
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But the chancellor, whose towering approval ratings had long carried her party to victories at the polls over the last 11 years, has suddenly turned into a liability amid a frightening fall in support.
“Right now, the chancellor is not hitting the right tone in nearly all the areas that most concern her voters: refugees, Europe, public safety”, wrote Gabor Steingart, the publisher of the main business daily Handelsblatt, which has been among her strongest critics.
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.
The Sunday contest was viewed by many as a referendum on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s immigration policy, and her party suffered a significant defeat on her home turf.
Nearly 1.1 million refugees, most of whom were fleeing war and violence in Iraq and Syria, arrived in Germany in 2015.
One of Mrs Merkel’s top deputies in Berlin, Michael Grosse-Groehmer, told ZDF: “This isn’t pretty for us”.
Deutsche Welle reports the CDU’s Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), is unhappy about Angela Merkel’s refugee policies.
The chancellor, who was attending a G20 summit in China, once again strongly defended her policy towards the refugee crisis on Monday, saying, “I consider the fundamental decisions as right”. “Those who voted for the AfD were sending a message of protest”.
A nationalist, anti-immigration party has beaten Angela Merkel’s conservatives into third place in a state election in her own political fiefdom. “However, I believe the decisions that have been made were right, and now we must continue working”. If she does, Sunday’s results show she’ll have a challenge on her hands. It is Germany’s poorest and least populous state.
CSU leader Horst Seehofer, Bavaria’s governor, told the daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung that the situation for the conservatives is “highly threatening”.
The CSU has been railing against Merkel’s steadfast opposition to putting limits on the number of refugees even though Germany took in more than the rest of Europe combined in 2015.
The AfD, initially an anti-euro party, has enjoyed a rapid rise as the party of choice for voters dismayed by Mrs Merkel’s policy.
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Merkel asked for more time to address the remaining problems.
