Germany: vice chancellor criticizes Merkel after election

The centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), which now heads a grand coalition with the CDU as its junior partner, remained the strongest party at 30.6 per cent.

A nationalist, anti-immigration party has beaten Angela Merkel’s conservatives into third place in a state election in her own political fiefdom.

The opposition party’s win has been widely attributed to the German Chancellor’s controversial ‘open door’ refugee policy.

Sundays result could make it more hard for Merkel to bury a festering dispute with the Christian Social Union, the Bavarian arm of her conservative bloc, which has long criticized her decision to open the borders and advocated an annual cap on migrants.

A year after her controversial decision to let the refugees establish in Germany, Merkel’s popularity dropped significantly.

“Leif-Erik Holm, who heads the AfD in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, said that the election result should act as a warning to the government to rethink its open-arms refugee policies”.

Despite the strong result, there is no prospect of the AfD going into government as the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats have said they would not form a coalition with the party.

Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere, a fellow Christian Democrat, rejected criticism from some in the CDU’s Christian Social Union (CSU) sister party that Merkel’s refugee policy was responsible for the rise of the AfD party.

The state has been run for the past decade by the parties that now run Germany.

Germany let in nearly 1 million people past year and, this summer, suffered a series of terrorist attacks, with AfD riding a wave of popular fear and scepticism.

That would catapult the party into the German parliament for the first time since its creation in 2013.

The AfD in the state of Baden-Württemberg recently suffered an internal split over a member of the legislature, Wolfgang Gedeon, who withdrew from the party faction within months of his election over charges that he had made anti-Semitic comments and belittled the Holocaust in writings.

Although she won praise at first, the mood has since turned, giving way to fears over how Europe’s biggest economy will manage to integrate the million people who arrived past year alone.

BBC Berlin correspondent Damien McGuinness says that following her political humiliation, Mrs Merkel will come to alter her position that is welcoming.

The official results, released early Monday, underscored the tough road ahead for Merkel as she weighs whether to make a fourth bid to lead Germany in national elections next year. “Everyone knows that she lost this election”.