German elections to test support for migrant policy
BERLIN — Chancellor Angela Merkel faces a voter backlash in elections Sunday over her open-door policy that has allowed a flood of migrants to settle in Germany.
The vote in three German states is the first electoral test for Merkel, 61, before national parliamentary elections next year.
The chancellor allowed more than one million migrants fleeing wars and poverty to enter Europe’s largest economy to apply for asylum, a move that has put her at odds with many members of her conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party and alienated large swathes of the German public.
The parliamentary elections in Baden-Württemberg, Rhineland-Palatinate and Saxony-Anhalt have been labelled “Super Sunday,” a nod to the “Super Tuesday” presidential primary elections and caucuses in the United States this month.
More than 12 million of Germany’s 62 million eligible voters may cast ballots. The last public opinion polls before the vote showed a surge i n support for Alternative for Deutschland (AfD), a populist, anti-immigrant party. It shocked Germans earlier this year when its leader Frauke Petry, 40, said police may need to shoot migrants at the border.
Merkel said the AfD “does not bring society together and offers no appropriate solutions, but only stokes prejudices and divisions.”
The German news weekly Der Spiegel put the AfD’s leader Petry on its cover last week next to the words “The preachers of hate.”
While the AfD does not have seats in the national parliament, the Bundestag, it could gain as many as eight seats in state parliaments, up from five now.
Matthias Kortmann, a politics professor at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, said the AfD may gain momentum to secure a Bundestag seat in next year ’s nationwide vote. The threshold to do that is five per cent.
The AfD was founded three years ago as an opposition group to successive European Union bailouts for Greece and the eurozone currency bloc. Its current focus is on Merkel’s handling of the biggest flood of mi- grants into Europe since the Second World War.
“How the refugee crisis evolves and what’s done about it will determine how far the AfD can ultimately go,” Kortmann said.
“We can make a comparison with the popularity of Donald Trump i n the United States,” he said. “The interest in AfD in Germany is partly because its leaders are saying something that others won’t, but the party doesn’t actually have a manifesto or that many specific ideas about policies.”
Petry, nevertheless, told supporters at a recent rally the “power of the established parties was crumbling.” She has been unapologetic in her views about what is ailing modern Germany: Merkel’s open-door migrant’s policy, bailouts for fiscally irresponsible nations like Greece and eroding Christian values.
“Right and left (political) terms haven’t fitted for a while,” she said.
German police officers must “use firearms if necessary,” to stop “illegal border crossings,” Petry said in the comments about shooting migrants at the border.
Jakob Augstein, a columnist for Der Spiegel, has referred to Petry as the “smiling face” of the far right because of her characteristically even-handed manner delivering messages many in Germany consider extreme.
The polls suggest Merkel’s CDU will lose its majority in Baden-Württemberg, a prosperous area in Germany’s south-west, to the Green Party. In Rhineland-Palatinate, the CDU is in a close battle with its current leftof-centre coalition government partner, the Social Democratic Party (SPD). In the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, the CDU is likely to retain its dominant position. The polling data were published by Politbarometer for German state broadcaster ZDF.
A separate poll this week by research firm Forsa showed Merkel’s personal approval rating has risen to its highest level this year: up two percentage points to 50 per cent.