“I’m the party chairwoman, and I’m not going to duck responsibility”, Merkel told reporters a day after her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party received 18% of the vote in elections in Germany’s capital.
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“We weren’t exactly the world champions in integration before the refugee influx”, she wryly admitted, noting that the infrastructure for getting newcomers into language and job training had to be ramped up overnight.
Former CDU voters have also turned to liberal third-party options in backlash of the situation. The Green Party received 15.2 percent, down by 2.4 percentage points.
While the Social Democrats (SPD) and Merkel’s Christian Democratic Party (CDU) emerged from the Berlin election as the two strongest parties, both lost some support which means they won’t be able to continue a coalition government, official results showed Monday.
“I take responsibility as party leader and chancellor”, Merkel said at a news conference alongside her party’s mayoral candidate, Frank Henkel. Disillusionment is high over the capital’s notoriously inefficient bureaucracy and issues such as years of delays in opening its new airport.
Many disillusioned Berliners who didn’t vote in the last election backed the nationalist Alternative for Germany, however, driving turnout up to 66.9 percent from 60.2 percent in 2011.
Markus Söder, the Bavarian finance minister of the CSU, the Bavarian sister-party to the CDU, called the Berlin election the “second massive wake-up call” in two weeks.
Party leaders announced Monday that they are now setting their sights on next year’s federal election and aiming for a double-digit result. She vowed to address voters’ concerns about immigration, but maintained that if people don’t want Muslim asylum-seekers due to their religion, that was against the party and country’s basic principles. It finished fifth in Sunday’s vote with 14.1 percent and now has seats on legislatures in 10 states. Co-chairman Joerg Meuthen said AfD was trying to solve the problem and stressed that the party wouldn’t tolerate anti-Semitism in its ranks.
“There is no question, we didn’t get a good result in Berlin today”, said Michael Grosse-Broemer, a senior CDU politician.
The elections are seen as a litmus test for Merkel’s controversial refugee policy, with more than 1 million asylum seekers having entered the country from war-torn countries in the Middle East and Africa.
She went on to describe AfD as “a party that incites against minorities in a disgusting manner, that wants to make National Socialist terminology and approaches acceptable again, that is unable to distance itself credibly from neo-Nazis and Holocaust-deniers”.
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In the beginning of the campaign, the Christian Democrats reflected a Merkel-esque “put government in trustworthy hands” campaign.
