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.
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Merkel’s Christian Democratic Party (CDU) is projected to suffer heavy losses against the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) and Germany’s anti-refugee right-wing political party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), raising the pressure on the chancellor one year before national elections. The left-leaning coalition that could now take over office would likely be more welcoming of refugees than the current state government.
The CDU won 17.6% of the vote – its worst-ever result in Berlin. However, when asked if an SPD-Green-Left Party coalition could serve as a model for a national ruling coalition, Özdemir said, “I think the age of political models is over”. Disillusionment is high over the capital’s notoriously inefficient bureaucracy and issues such as years of delays in opening its new airport.
She cited recent opinion polls predicting the party could receive 14 to 15 percent at the national level.
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.
“We see that in many regions of Germany the CDU bases, the party bases, don’t agree with Merkel’s policy any more”, she said.
The vote comes two weeks after Merkel’s CDU was beaten into third place in the eastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania by the AfD, following a campaign in which the chancellor’s decision to open Germany’s borders to migrants a year ago featured prominently. They were founded in 2013 as an anti-euro party, now polls nationally at between 11 and 14 per cent.
But she sounded ready to compromise with the CSU, saying that if the wish of the German people was for the country not to be swamped with uncontrolled migration “then that is exactly what I am fighting for”.
Electoral successes by the AfD in a string of state votes are roiling politics in Europe’s biggest economy after last year’s record influx of asylum seekers, which has dragged down poll ratings for Merkel and her party.
The vote marked another milestone for the upstart AfD, which has campaigned on a xenophobic platform, similar to France’s National Front or far-right populists in Austria and the Netherlands. “Whenever the AfD has stood for election, the turnout has increased”, he said; data showed a large portion of previous non-voters supporting the AfD, as in several other states recently. “But its foundations won’t be shaken”.
Another analyst, Kai Arzheimer of Mainz University, also predicted tensions would rise between the CDU and its Bavarian sister party the CSU, but he stressed the alliance was unlikely to change its top candidate, Merkel.
Merkel is widely expected to seek a fourth term in next year’s election, though she still hasn’t declared her hand.
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Merkel said she wouldn’t accept a “static” cap on the number of migrants coming to Germany, leaving open the possibility that some sort of flexible maximum could be introduced – a position she has previously rejected.
