The newcomer anti-migration party in Germany has scored high in Berlin’s regional election on Sunday.
The Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) achieved 14.2% of the vote. The double digit result was just three percentage points below that received by Chancellor Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
The CDU received 17.6% of the vote, their worst result in Berlin’s post-war history.
The outcome prompted AfD’s deputy leader to take to Facebook.
“From today onward the competition between the AfD and the CDU for the leadership of the middle class camp has been set alight,” Beatrix von Storch wrote on Sunday.
Germany is gearing up for national elections in 2017. Von Storch predicted that her party will take third place at the least.
“In 2017 we will witness Angela Merkel fighting for her political life and the AfD will become the third largest political power in Germany - at the least,” she forecast.
Nevertheless, the AfD was in fifth place in Berlin. The Greens took fourth place with 15%. The far-left Die Linke increased their votes to 16%, giving it third place.
Although heavy losses were incurred by both of the mainstream parties which have taken turns to government the country since the war, the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) held first place with 21.6% and the centre-right CDU slid into second.
After defeats for the Christian Democrats in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Rhineland-Westphalia and Baden–Württemberg, the Berlin result is the fourth blow in a row for the CDU.
The AfD will be entering the Berlin’s regional government for the first time, on top of a string of successes in regional elections elsewhere which have brought it opposition seats in 10 of Germany’s 16 states. This marks another first, namely a party to the right of the established CDU gaining a foothold in post-war Germany.
But its performance was short of its expectations – it had anticipated coming in second.
Days before the election, mayor Michael Müller had warned that a double-digit score for the AfD “would be seen around the world as a sign of the return of the rightwing and the Nazis in Germany”.
“Berlin is not any old city”, the SPD politician wrote on Facebook on Thursday. “Berlin is the city that transformed itself from the capital of Hitler’s Nazi Germany into a beacon of freedom, tolerance, diversity and social cohesion.”
Voter polls indicated local concerns centred on public services, the local economy and education system. Campaigning rhetoric was dominated by the housing shortage, rising rental prices and the fiasco of Berlin’s long-awaited new airport, five years late and three times over budget.
But in the vote some fear or anger was registered over the refugee crisis, perhaps most strongly from the city’s former communist east districts.
The Berlin outcome appears to be part of a trend in which small, new, fringe parties of both left and right persuasion have broken up the traditional hold of dominant centrists parties.
This has caused an on-going deadlock in Spain which has been without a proper government for nine months. Anti-migrant parties have been gaining ground in France, Austria and the Netherlands.
