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Anti-Immigrant Party Makes Gains in German Elections, Exit Polls Suggest Anti-Immigrant Party Makes Gains in German Elections, Exit Polls Suggest
(about 4 hours later)
BERLIN — An upstart far-right party campaigning on an anti-immigrant platform made strong gains in regional balloting across Germany on Sunday, while Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives suffered losses in two western states, initial projections showed. BERLIN — A far-right party fiercely opposed to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s welcome for refugees made startling gains in three state elections in Germany on Sunday, dealing the chancellor a blow as she tries to seal a deal with Turkey to reduce the influx of migrants.
The vote was widely viewed as a test of Ms. Merkel’s welcoming policy toward refugees. If the chancellor’s center-right party fails to oust sitting governors in the western states of Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate that could weaken her days before she heads to Brussels to complete a deal with Turkey to stop the flow of migrants into Europe. In elections that showed how strongly the refugee crisis has scrambled politics and daily life in Germany, Ms. Merkel’s center-right Christian Democrats failed to wrest control of two states in western Germany where they had once been expected to do so.
Final results were not expected until early Monday, but initial projections based on exit polls by the polling group Infratest dimap for the public broadcaster ARD indicated that the chancellor’s Christian Democrats would not garner enough votes to take control of either of the western states. In the one eastern state that voted, her party finished first. But the Alternative for Germany, a populist, nationalist party formed in 2013, was only five percentage points behind.
Although Ms. Merkel’s party appeared poised to emerge as the strongest force in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, it may prove difficult for the party to form a government there, given the strong showing of the far-right party Alternative for Germany. That party appeared likely to emerge as the second-place party, capturing more than 20 percent of the vote after galvanizing voters through its campaign to protect German’s national identity as the number of migrants increases. Ms. Merkel, now facing the toughest challenges of her political career, had no immediate comment on Sunday. She left that to party lieutenants on television talk shows that spent hours dissecting the muddled outcome of the first big electoral test of Ms. Merkel’s refugee policy.
The chancellor has maintained her calm and continued to insist that history will bear out the wisdom of her decision to take in hundreds of thousands of refugees at a time when Germany, Europe’s largest economy, is struggling to find enough skilled workers to fill jobs. Asked at a campaign rally on Saturday how she was preparing for Sunday’s results, the chancellor said she was “crossing her fingers.” Several analysts noted that despite the relatively poor showing by Ms. Merkel’s party, two governors from other parties who supported her refugee policy retained their seats. The Green incumbent won in Baden-Württemberg in the southwest, and the Social Democrat won in neighboring Rhineland-Palatinate.
Voter turnout was high among the 12.7 million Germans eligible to vote on Sunday. They account for only about a fifth of the country’s overall electorate, but the balloting was the largest to take place before the next general election, in 2017. Heading into the vote, experts predicted that the outcome would indicate the direction the country was going and serve as an evaluation of the chancellor’s policies. Ursula von der Leyen, the defense minister and a leading member of Ms. Merkel’s party, noted the governors’ support for the policy while conceding, on a talk show, that the overall outcome was “a paradox.”
About 63 percent of eligible voters turned out in Saxony-Anhalt, many of them motivated by the Alternative for Germany, a protest party founded in 2013 in response to disillusionment with traditional parties’ handling of the sovereign debt crisis. The Alternative for Germany has since transformed into an anti-immigrant party, whose leader has said border guards might turn guns on anyone entering the country illegally. In a telephone interview, Jürgen Falter, a professor of politics at Johannes Gutenberg university in Mainz, said the gains in the three state legislatures by the Alternative for Germany were “a clear warning shot for Ms. Merkel’s refugee policy.”
If they do secure second place in the state Legislature, it will make forming a coalition a challenge for the Christian Democrats, given expected losses by their current partners, the Social Democrats. Ms. Merkel has no reason to fear for her position, either as party leader or chancellor, he added. She has no serious competitors, and unseating a chancellor is a complex process.
The projections also showed the Alternative for Germany winning enough support to enter into the legislatures of both of the western states, a development that raises its presence at the regional level to representation in half of the country’s 16 states. But Sunday’s results showed considerable opposition to her policy within Germany. And in Europe, several countries have refused to take in refugees and have closed their borders to migrants, rejecting Ms. Merkel’s appeal for a unified approach to the challenges posed by the more than one million who have arrived since early 2015.
In Baden-Württemberg, controlled for decades by Ms. Merkel’s center-right party, the left-leaning Greens, whose incumbent governor, Winfried Kretschmann, was swept into power five years ago over worries about nuclear power after the Fukushima disaster in Japan, helped his party to emerge as the strongest force in the state. Mr. Kretschman had supported the chancellor’s refugee policies. This week, Ms. Merkel hopes to conclude a deal with Turkey to stem the flow. In exchange for European concessions such as visa-free travel for Turks, and up to 6 billion euros, or about $6.7 billion, in aid, Turkey would take back any illegal migrants crossing from its shores to Greece.
In Rhineland-Palatinate, the projections showed the chancellor’s party losing to its partners in the national government, the center-left Social Democrats, despite fielding a close ally of the chancellor, Julia Klöckner, as their leading candidate. But a crackdown on the news media in Turkey, growing clashes between Turks and Kurds, and general violence there — a bombing was reported in Ankara on Sunday — make the deal tough for some European countries to accept.
Yet even the incumbent Social Democratic governor, Malu Dreyer, may have a difficult time forming a coalition given the strong showing of the Alternative for Germany, which projections showed taking support from both of the leading parties. The chancellor has refused to set limits on the influx, and has argued that Germany and at least some other European countries can afford to shelter those fleeing war and hardship.
Such splintering of loyalties in a political system steeped in longstanding party alliances reflects the level of uncertainty many Germans feel as their country adjusts to accommodating and integrating several hundred thousand of the more than one million migrants who arrived last year seeking refuge from wars, or simply a better life. Her tone hardened considerably after hundreds of reported sexual assaults by young male migrants on young women in Cologne on New Year’s Eve, and as she hit the campaign trail in recent weeks. Yet that “didn’t really do any good” in terms of the Christian Democrats’ showing on Sunday, Professor Falter said.
Ms. Merkel’s open-door statements have also created rifts within Europe, where many traditional allies felt overrun by what they viewed as a one-sided decision. She struggled at a summit meeting in Brussels last week to galvanize support for a deal with Turkey aimed at preventing migrants from reaching the European Union’s outer borders. In all three states, turnout rose considerably, to 70 percent in the two western states and 61 percent in the eastern state, Saxony Anhalt.
That deal is to be sealed at an upcoming meeting on Thursday and Friday, and a poor showing in the elections at home risks leaving Ms. Merkel weakened heading into those negotiations. Frauke Petry, who has spearheaded the advance of the Alternative for Germany, triumphantly proclaimed that her party had rekindled voter interest. “The voters have turned away from the two big parties, in considerable droves,” she said on the public broadcaster ZDF.
The Alternative for Germany was already in five of Germany’s 16 state legislatures, but Sunday’s results showed its new strength. The party won 15.1 percent of the vote in Baden-Württemberg and 12.6 percent in Rhineland-Palatinate, according to official results, and 24 percent in Saxony-Anhalt, according to projections by ARD and ZDF television.
In all three states, the showing by the new party illustrated the decline of the traditional parties. They have rejected any coalition with Alternative for Germany, but excluding it makes it harder to form majorities to govern.
It also risks further alienating those who voted for the anti-immigrant party. Voter patterns analyzed by pollsters for the two public service broadcasters showed that the Alternative for Germany drew support from people who traditionally do not vote and from disillusioned Christian Democrats, but from also supporters of the Social Democrats and the far-left Left party.
In Saxony Anhalt, people who did not vote in previous elections were the biggest source of the new party’s support. That state has relatively high unemployment and has been losing industry and population.
Karl-Rudolf Korte, a professor of politics at the University of Duisburg-Essen, predicted that Germany’s big parties, which govern in a “grand coalition” nationally, would draw closer together as a result of Sunday’s elections. In other European countries, a closing of the establishment ranks has kept extremists from power, but has not necessarily brought their voters back to the mainstream parties.
At the Alternative for Germany’s celebrations in Berlin, jubilant supporters insisted that they were not far-right extremists.
“The current policy of the national government has done everything as wrong as it could in presenting us as Nazis and not as people who just want change,” said Klemens Riebe, 59, who works at a utility in Berlin. “And let’s remember that many of our members come from the middle class.”
Particularly in Saxony-Anhalt, voters feel dislocated by globalization, much as supporters of Donald J. Trump do in the United States, Professor Falter noted.
“In this new world,” he said, “there is much more insecurity than there was before.”