The Alternative for Germany party (AfD), which has campaigned hard against Chancellor Merkel’s policies on refugees, is estimated to have won 21% in the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern contest.
Advertisement
The nationalist, anti-migrant Alternative for Germany finished in second place, with 21 percent of the vote, behind the center-left Social Democrats, with nearly 31 percent.
The remarks by the Social Democrat vice-chairman were the latest in the “blame game” – focused on refugee policy – since Merkel’s Christian Democratic (CDU) was relegated to third place in Sunday’s Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania election.
However, it appears that AfD also managed to attract a considerable number of voters who previously favored the leftist movements, which can be interpreted as a sign of a “shift to the right” among the German electorate, DW points out.
According to a Reuters report on the elections, the AfD, which was founded in 2013, has now won seats in nine of the 16 state assemblies in Germany. It was the first of five regional votes before a national election expected next September.
There have been rumors that the powerful CSU leader, Bavaria state premier Horst Seehofer, is considering a run for chancellor in 2017 instead of supporting Merkel’s candidacy.
The CDU’s general secretary Peter Tauber said Sunday’s results were “bitter”, acknowledging that voters “wanted to send a signal of protest, as we had noticed in discussions about refugees”. “The issue of integration will play a major role, as will the repatriation of refugees without a permit of stay”, Merkel said.
“If a lot of CDU members start seeing this defeat as Merkel’s fault, and members of parliament start seeing her as a danger for the party and their own jobs, the whole situation could escalate out of control”, he told the paper.
“A million refugees have come here”.
Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, which is Merkel’s home region, is a small coastal state in northeastern Germany with just 1.3 million eligible voters.
“They are not the fringes; they are not in the single digits; they are in more than half the state parliaments”. “People do not support this policy anymore”.
The AfD’s win was cheered by the leader of France’s far-right National Front party, Marine Le Pen, who posted on Twitter: “What was impossible yesterday has become possible: the patriots of AfD sweep up the party of Ms Merkel”.
Mrs Merkel has defended her policies but said she needs to “win back trust”.
“She is, in people’s perception, personally responsible for the border opening, and she has to deal with that”, political science professor Karl-Rudolf Korte told ZDF television.
Ahead of Sunday’s vote, Merkel had urged the population to reject the populists.
Advertisement
The significant issues of integration and the deportation of failed asylum seekers were mentioned by Ms. Merkel who has turned more hard line on the migrant crisis in recent weeks claiming that she does not want to see a repeat of past year.
