Social Democrats strongest in Berlin elections

Sunday’s vote comes two weeks after Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union was beaten into third place by the nationalist Alternative for Germany, or AfD, in the eastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, where Merkel has her parliamentary constituency.

The anti-Islam Alternative for Germany party won over 12 percent, according to public broadcasters’ projections, in the capital which has long prided itself on being a hip, diverse and multicultural city.

Polls show the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) may be able to drop Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) as coalition partners in the capital’s assembly.

However the AfD party, led by young chemist Frauke Petry, has been making huge gains in recent months, winning almost 21 per cent of the vote in an election two weeks ago.

“Voters in Germany use state elections to teach politicians at the national level a lesson”, said Nils Diederich, a professor at the Otto Suhr Institute of Political Science in Berlin.

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. The Left party (Die Linke), which was founded in 2007 to challenge the Social Democrats, has also seen the AfD seize some of its support in the east.

A late wild card in the vote were reports featured prominently in German newspapers of a clash Wednesday night in the state of Saxony between 20 refugees and what police said were some 80 right-wing extremists. The groups threw bottles and wooden slats at each other.

Berlin’s SPD Mayor Michael Mueller dramatically warned on the eve of the election that a strong AfD result would be “seen throughout the world as a sign of the resurgence of the right and of Nazis in Germany”.

“I think it is unsafe to transfer the Berlin result to the federal level”, he told broadcaster ZDF.

But the recent arrivals of people from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere are mainly ill-prepared for such training, they say. In a speech last month, Mr. Trump was bitingly critical of Ms. Merkel’s immigration stance and accused Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton of wanting to follow the chancellor’s lead.

As about 30 people chanted “Merkel Muß Weg!”

“We are the strongest political party and we have a mandate to form a government”, he said.

A shortage of affordable housing has also become a hot-button issue as property prices and rents have shot up with an influx of 50,000 newcomers every year.

It has also tapped into popular frustration with the CDU and SPD, who rule Germany in a “grand coalition”.