On the face of it, Sunday’s regional elections in Germany would appear to have gone disastrously wrong for Angela Merkel and her party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). There were losses across the board; 12 per cent in the once strongly conservative Baden-Wuerttemberg, three per cent in the prosperous western state of Rhineland-Palatinate and two per cent in the much less well-off Saxony-Anhalt in the East.
Furthermore, the spiky, new upstart Alternative for Germany (AfD) did well in all three Laender on the back of a programme that stood in direct contravention to Merkel’s. The AfD, a party that came in to existence to criticise Merkel’s Eurocrisis management, has metamorphosed in to the fiercest critic of her migration policies and will now have a strong presence in the parliaments of all three states.
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