Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party suffered the latest in a string of defeats in German state elections on Sunday, when her Christian Democratic Union was ousted from power in Berlin after its worst showing in the capital since World War II, according to exit polls.
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Anti-immigrant party Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) will enter Berlin’s state parliament for the first time, after winning 14.2% of the vote.
Dr Merkel said she would turn back time if she could to be better prepared for the influx of around one million migrants who flooded into Germany a year ago, adding that if she knew how people wanted her to change her migrant policy, she would consider it.
The results from the Berlin state election has raised more doubts about whether Europe’s most powerful leader will stand for a fourth term.
Merkel added that she’s prepared to address voters’ concerns about the unprecedented influx of migrants over the past year last year, but that if people simply don’t want Muslim asylum-seekers due to their religion, then that would be counter to her Christian Democratic Party’s basic principles, as well as Germany’s.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel in the lower house of parliament Bundestag, Berlin, June 28.
The SPD won 23% of the vote, dropping 5.3%, while the CDU won 18%, down 5.4%, ARD public television reported.
The Social Democrat SPD has emerged as the strongest party with a projected 22%, in spite of losing nearly 7% of their voters.
Preliminary results from Sunday’s elections showed they had won over 12 percent of the vote in the state, enough to secure a presence in Berlin’s regional assembly.
Mrs Merkel said she would not repeat her earlier slogan in the migrant crisis of “We can do it” because it had become “an empty phrase”.
But she said: “The almost 15% win for the right wing AfD even in this very liberal city shows that, like many other parts of the country, it has surged to become a real political force that Merkel can not ignore”. In particular, they want a cap of 200,000 refugees per year but Merkel has rejected this outright.
Nonetheless, the vote marked another milestone for the upstart AfD, which has campaigned on a xenophobic platform – similar to France’s National Front and far-right populists in Austria and the Netherlands – and gained support especially in Berlin’s poor eastern districts.
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“We are all angry that the AfD got in”, Michael Mueller, Berlin’s mayor and the Social Democrats’ leading candidate, told cheering supporters in the capital.
