Merkel’s CDU beaten by anti-immigrant AfD in state election

Defending her open-door policy towards refugees, Merkel, who has led Europe’s economic powerhouse for almost 11 years, is insisting she feels no guilt over a series of violent attacks in Germany and was right to allow hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees to arrive last summer.

Illustrating the political damage to Merkel over her policy, a survey published Thursday show her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) expected to garner 22 per cent at the polls – only as much as the anti-migrant upstart party AfD. Its support dropped below the 5 percent needed to keep them, with many supporters apparently switching to AfD. The Social Democrats, who have governed the region since 1998, won with about 30 percent, dropping the CDU to third place.

Sunday’s election is the first of five state votes due before the national poll.

A year before national elections in which Ms Merkel may seek a fourth term, the defeat underscores the surge in public anxiety in Germany that’s put the chancellor on the defensive after more than 1 million asylum seekers arrived last year.

But the AfD was soon riven by an internal rift between the moderate Luecke and the hardline Frauke Petry, which was tugging the party further right. The question come to the mind of the ordinary people regardless of their partisan affiliation is that what to do with the refugees standing behind the borders of the European states in the cold weather? The Christian Democrats, by contrast, were to receive 19% – the party’s worst-ever result in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, a sparsely populated, economically challenged state in the former East Germany that is home to Merkel.

In a campaign appearance on Saturday (4 September), in Mecklenburg-west Pomerania, Merkel said, “Every vote counts”, and urged the people to look beyond the divisive rhetoric and take into consideration the policies of the coalition government that halved unemployment numbers and the increased tourism to the coastal state.

Mrs von Storch told Sky News that Mrs Merkel’s approach to refugees is “going to destroy Germany and Europe”.

Compared to other states across Germany, the northeastern Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania hosts just a small proportion of migrants under a quota system based on states’ income and population – having taken in 25,000 asylum seekers a year ago.

A series of attacks carried out by asylum seekers in July – including two claimed by the Islamic State group – gave way to anti-migrant sentiment, with the issues of immigration and integration emerging as the decisive factor for one in three voters, opinion polls showed.

Merkel also said she expected a resolution in Germany’s dispute with Ankara over visits to an air base in Turkey.

“The repercusions of this result will resonate across Germany because we know that within 12 months there will be a general election”, Al Jazeera’s Dominic Kane, reporting from Schwerin, the capital of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern region, said. “And we saw that particularly in discussions about refugees”. Social Democrat leader Sigmar Gabriel said Germany’s main “political parties must ask themselves how we can stop people from choosing the AfD”.