Three regional elections in Germany on Sunday have dented the standing of Angela Merkel.
Her Christian Democrat (CDU) party lost two of the three states in the elections, according to exit polls.
Political newcomer Alternative for Germany (AfD) picked up votes, but did not receive a governing majority.
The result is widely seen as a rejection of Merkel’s open-door policy on migrants.
The Chancellor, who has been in power since 2005, is in the midst of negotiating a deal between the EU and Turkey to curtail migration. Now it appears she will have to go back to her European partners to get their backing for the deal.
Baden-Wuerttemberg in the southwest had supported the Christian Democrats for more than 50 years until 2011 when the vote brought in a coalition led by the Greens. The Greens have again won the majority – about 33% and the CDU taking 28%.
Another southwest state, Rhineland-Palatinate, returned the Social Democrat (SPD) party with 38% of the vote and giving 33% to the CDU, according to exit polls.
Merkel’s CDU had hoped to win back power in these two former bastions.
Voters in Saxony-Anhalt in former East Germany kept the CDU as the largest party but anti-immigration AfD won 22% of the election. It marks the first time the AfD had become the second-biggest party in any regional state.
Comments
What is so interesting for the more perceptive is how the un-elected Brussels Civil Servants have turned the vocabulary on its head and, in English at least, have begun rubbishing 'populism'. When being popular is precisely what gets a political party votes and a politician re-elected. It means that they are effective, particularly in a first past the post system like the UK.
And the supreme irony being that the UK is kicking off, amongst other things, about too many economic migrants from the less developed EU (100,000 plus from Portugal alone!) - which are exactly the countries against economic migrants in their own countries.
So now expect from Brussels, as well the less developed EU countries, more of this sneering that Alternative for Germany is just 'populism'. And from Merkel that there is a distinction that 'well educated' refugees from war in the Middle East can 'maybe' keep coming (but not those from wars in sub-Saharan Africa !) or those damned economic migrants.