German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives suffer another electoral blow after Berlin elections in which voters reject her migrant policy and lend more support to an emergent far-right anti-immigration party.
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Almost half of Sunday’s AfD supporters voted for minor parties or didn’t vote at all in the last state election, an exit poll released by public broadcaster ZDF said.
While finishing in fifth place, AfD won 14 percent of the votes, allowing the three-year-old party to enter its 10th regional assembly among Germany’s 16 states.
Mrs Merkel’s CDU, which has a national majority, in Berlin has served as junior coalition partner to Mr Mueller’s SPD, traditionally the strongest party in the city.
The anti-immigrant party is now poised to enter the city-state’s legislature for the first time, although its share of the vote, about 12 per cent, was less than it was two weeks ago in Merkel’s home state, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, where it placed second, ahead of the chancellor’s conservative party.
The results from the Berlin state election has raised more doubts about whether Europe’s most powerful leader will stand for a fourth term.
The Social Democrat party has emerged as the strongest party with a projected 22 percent, in spite of losing nearly 7 percent of their voters. They were founded in 2013 as an anti-euro party, now polls nationally at between 11 and 14 per cent.
Germany’s two governing establishment parties, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Social Democratic party (SPD) on Sunday night both plummeted to the worst Berlin result in their parties’ histories, while both leftwing Die Linke and anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) enjoyed impressive gains. Will the SPD be able to use the tail wind from the state elections or weaken further?
Berlin hosts over 70,000 of the 1 million asylum seekers Germany took in past year.
According to The Telegraph, for many Germans, Berlin is emblematic of their country’s rise from the ashes of the Second World War and the Cold War and is inextricably linked with modern Germany’s reputation for tolerance and openness.
The party’s State chairman, Georg Pazderski, has since set his sights on next year’s federal election.
Surging nationalist party Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) was declared the big victor after reaching a high share of votes in notoriously liberal Berlin.
Voters appear to have punished German Chancellor Merkel for allowing some 1.1 million migrants fleeing war and poverty to be registered in Germany, after several other European Union countries such as Hungary showed open hostility towards them.
“They’re a single-issue party” focused on the refugee crisis, said McAllister, the former Lower Saxony prime minister.
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“From zero to double digits, that’s unique for Berlin”. She showed signs of doing so in a magazine interview released this weekend, in which she for the first time distanced herself from her “We can do it!” mantra voicing confidence that Germany could handle the refugees.
