Still reeling from a state election rout which unleashed a party row about her open-door migrant policy, Angela Merkel’s conservatives are bracing for further losses in the Berlin city vote on Sunday.
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Merkel’s centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU) have a national majority but in Berlin serve as junior coalition partners to the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) of Mayor Michael Mueller, traditionally the strongest party in the city of 3.5 million.
Merkel told RBB-Inforadio that, if needed, special provisions could be developed to speed up the integration of refugees but acknowledged this would still take time.
Exit polls showed the CDU gained 21 per cent of the vote in the east, while just 13.5 per cent voted for them in the west.
Economists say that most refugees who have found employment are in the services sector, often in smaller companies or in smaller towns and cities to which refugees are dispersed under a strict German formula for allocating new arrivals according to the wealth and population of states and districts.
Mr Mueller, however, said after the results that “we have achieved our goal”.
The AfD, which has won seats in nine of Germany’s 16 states, has successfully played on immigration fears.
“The negative implications of yet another strong AfD performance will further increase the pressure on Merkel”, Carsten Nickel, deputy director of research at Teneo Intelligence, said in a report on Wednesday. The SPD may now ditch the CDU from their coalition in the German capital. The city-state of Berlin is governed by a partnership between the Social Democrats and the CDU, but both parties are forecast to lose voters this weekend to the upstart AfD, which is set to enter Berlin’s state parliament for the first time. Migration was in part the reason for Britons’ decision to leave the European Union and it has been a feature of US Republican Party presidential hopeful Donald Trump’s campaign.
Seehofer said he wanted to end the conflict with Merkel before the CDU and CSU party conferences later this year.
Police in the eastern city of Leipzig say they received a report in the early hours of Saturday that the vehicle was on fire.
Frauke Petry, chairwoman of the right-populist party AfD, Alternative for Germany, addresses a news conference in Berlin.
It would prove that the protest party “doesn’t just benefit from discontent in rural areas but can establish itself.in a city of millions that is known for its open lifestyle”, said the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung newspaper.
Polls suggest their support will sink to at most 24 percent and 19 percent respectively.
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But he also voiced concern about the AfD, a party he labelled “the wolf in sheep’s clothing”. “We must prepare them for going back”.
