“It’s the refugees, stupid.” That might as well have been the catchphrase in Sunday’s regional elections in Germany, where Chancellor Angela Merkel’s ruling coalition suffered a crushing defeat. A budget surplus of 19 billion euros and the lowest unemployment rate in 25 years weren’t enough to keep the loyalty of voters in three states. The 1 million asylum seekers who reached Germany in 2015 — and the prospect of a similar number arriving this year — turned these elections into a referendum on Merkel’s refugee policy. The right-wing populist party, Alternative for Germany (AfD) burst into all three regional legislatures, winning not only a quarter of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, a rustbelt state in the former East Germany, but also 15 percent in wealthy Baden-Wuerttemberg, according to preliminary results. The AfD was founded as an anti-euro party during the Greek debt crisis, but has since taken a hard line on refugees. The upstart party now holds seats in half of Germany’s 16 state assemblies.
Discontent with Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) led to a 12 percent drop in support in Baden-Wuerttemberg — making the once marginal, environmentalist Greens the strongest party in the traditionally conservative state.
The results for Merkel’s coalition partner, the Social Democratic Party, were even more catastrophic. It suffered double-digit losses in Baden-Wuerttemberg and Saxony-Anhalt, and hung on to the wine-growing Rhineland-Palatinate only because the Christian Democratic Union did even worse.
“This is a tectonic shift in Germany’s political landscape,” said Horst Seehofer, head of the CDU’s ultra-conservative Bavarian sister party and the loudest internal critic of Merkel’s refugee policy.
Full Article: German election bruises Merkel, but isn’t a knockout blow.