Angela Merkel’s ruling CDU party has been beaten into third place by an anti-immigrant and anti-Islam party in elections in a north-eastern German state, TV exit polls suggest. The Alternative fuer Deutschland (AfD) party took 21% of the vote behind the centre-left SPD’s 30.5%. The German chancellor’s CDU was supported by only 19% of those who voted, according to the exit polls.
The third-place finish for the center-right CDU in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania does not bode well for Merkel and her party in next year’s federal elections, as Christopher Caldwell noted recently:
It is a warning. In about 12 months, France and Germany will have national elections. Top politicians face the equivalent of a Brexit /Trump/Sanders vote. Maybe that is why they have just killed a planned American-European trade pact. They will now inter the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement. (The pact is called TTIP where associations with NAFTA are toxic and TAFTA where “tip” is the preferred word for dumpster.)
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