German local elections portend troubles for Merkel

The Sunday contest was viewed by many as a referendum on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s immigration policy, and her party suffered a significant defeat on Merkel’s home turf.

Alternative für Deutschland, or AFD, defeated the Christian Democratic Union — Merkel’s party — in local elections in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern this weekend, coming in second behind the Social Democratic Party, according to exit polls.

Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is Merkel’s home state.

Experts say the results don’t mean there’s a looming disaster for Merkel in next year’s election if she chooses to run — the AFD would likely have trouble forming a coalition with more traditional political parties — but do signal some concerns for Merkel.

“What she has got right now is an insurgent, surging right-wing party, the Alternative für Deutschland, that has proven that they can succeed even on her home turf, so that party has really hit a tipping point now,” Ryan Heath, Politico’s senior European Union correspondent, said.

Merkel cannot simply dismiss the AFD no matter what her national strength, Heath said.

“They are not the fringes; they are not in the single digits; they are in more than half the state parliaments.”

Heath said analysts he spoke to believe Merkel still has an overwhelming likelihood of winning the national elections in 2017, but those predictions were based largely on the national weakness of the Social Democrats, currently the junior partner in the coalition government.

Still, the AFD hailed the results as a rejection of politics-as-usual.

“The elections in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern show that the citizens are no longer intimidated by the lip service of the old parties,” AFD party leader Frauke Petry tweeted Sunday.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

A referendum on refugees

Merkel’s position on opening Germany’s border to migrants may have hurt her party.

Peter Tauber, general secretary of the CDU, immediately blamed Merkel’s refugee policy for what he called a “bitter result, a new experience.”

Those are the lowest results ever seen for Merkel’s party in the Eastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and her party came in behind a party established in 2013.

Merkel vowed to boost security and improve counterterrorism measures, but she stood firm on Germany’s position of accepting nearly all asylum seekers found to be legitimate refugees. Germany took in more than 1 million refugees in 2015, making it the most open country in Europe to asylum seekers.

“We decided to fulfill our humanitarian tasks,” she told reporters at a news conference, according to a translator. “Refusing humanitarian support, that would be something I wouldn’t want to do and I wouldn’t recommend this to Germany.”

Merkel, who is in China at the G20 summit, is expected to make a statement Monday, when the official results are to be announced.

Rise of the right

Heath noted that the growing strength of the populist, anti-immigrant AFD mirrored similar parties in France, Poland and Hungary as well the Bexit vote in the United Kingdom and the rise of Donald Trump as the Republican presidential nominee in the United States.

The AFD is allied in neighboring Austria with the far-right Freedom Party, whose candidate Norbert Hofer nearly won a national election earlier this year. Petry told The Guardian in Junethat it was natural for her party to have relationships with its Austrian counterpart or other like-minded parties such as the True Finns or Danish People’s Party.

“It would be stupid not to talk to each other,” she told the British newspaper.

Just over a month ago, after a series of terrorist attacks in July, Merkel refused to back down on her immigration policy, which she has termed a moral responsibility, especially to people fleeing the horror of civil war in Syria.

The attacks have given way to mockery by some Germans as well as foreigners, who have dubbed the recent weeks of bloodshed on social media as #MerkelSommer, or even “Merkel’s summer of slaughter.”

Petry took over AFD after its founder, Bernd Lücke, was ousted. Lücke complained the party had become too xenophobic and pro-Russian. Lücke had targeted the euro, but the party grew because of the backlash against refugees.

Petry has contended the party is not against “real refugees,” but against migrants.

“There is enough space for refugees in Germany, but the problem is that we don’t distinguish anymore between migrants and asylum seekers,” she told The Guardian.

That might be a moot point since the closure of borders in southern and eastern Europe has stemmed the tide of refugees, which has allowed the AFD to campaign on stopping the “Islamification” of Germany.

The AFD has been called the political arm of the German group Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West. The group, known as PEGIDA, organized anti-immigration rallies a couple of years ago that drew thousands of people. It has adherents in neighboring countries.

The AFD, however, has been able to broaden its reach to Germans who may have been offended by the PEGIDA rallies. Petry has noted her party has positions on issues from improving state television to seeking a better balance between the state and individual.

That could represent a maturing that more Germans will find attractive, Heath said “One of the hot-button issues is immigration, but it is more than immigration and what you are seeing is these parties getting more subtle and a bit more sophisticated about how they reach out and grow their constituencies,” Heath said. “They are really developing this momentum so they can be not just one-hit wonders. … They are getting national appeal.”