{Alternative for Germany wins significant support in three state contests, as Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party struggles.}<\/p>\n
Supporters of Germany’s new anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party have celebrated after winning support in three regional elections with results that would have been unthinkable a year ago.<\/p>\n
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party, however, suffered a major setback in the three key state polls on Sunday, apparently over her liberal refugee policy.<\/p>\n
The CDU was defeated in two of the three states in regional elections, and scored a historic low 27 percent in its stronghold Baden-Wuerttemberg where it came in second place after the Greens.<\/p>\n
The populist AfD, which had sparked outrage by suggesting police may have to shoot at migrants to stop them entering the country, recorded double-digit support in the first elections they have stood for in all three regions.<\/p>\n
“What an amazing evening,” Andre Poggenburg, the AfD leader in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, said in a fiery speech in the state capital Magdeburg, calling the result “brilliant”.<\/p>\n
“We fought like lions for your land,” he said, dismissing Merkel as “the worst chancellor in the history of Germany.”<\/p>\n
Formed three years ago in opposition to eurozone bailouts, the AfD has morphed into an anti-refugee party over the past year, kicking out its founder and seizing on a record influx of refugees to lure new voters and steal disaffected members of Merkel’s conservatives.<\/p>\n
READ MORE: Germany’s Refugee Crisis <\/p>\n
“[The people] fear that they will be the losers of the refugee crisis. I don’t think that it’s a real threat, but the people feel that it’s a threat, and that’s why they’ve voted for the anti-refugee party,” Wolfgang Renzch, a political scientist in Germany, told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n
On Sunday the AfD won a shocking 24 percent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, to become the second-biggest party in the state parliament.<\/p>\n
The AfD also performed better than polls predicted in the two other states, winning nearly 15 percent in the
\nprosperous southern region of Baden-Wurttemberg and more than 12 percent in Rhineland Palatinate,
\na western wine-making state.<\/p>\n
READ MORE: Reporting for refugees in Germany<\/p>\n
Exit polls showed that the AfD drew most of their support from people who previously hadn’t voted for a party, but they also drew thousands of voters from Merkel’s conservatives, particularly in Baden-Wurttemberg.<\/p>\n
The AfD narrowly missed the five percent hurdle needed to enter the federal parliament in 2013, but is now represented in the state assemblies of half of Germany’s 16 states. <\/p>\n
While populist, anti-immigrant parties have thrived for years in other European countries, Germany has
\nbeen an exception, in part because opposition to far-right ideologies runs deep because of the country’s Nazi past.<\/p>\n
The refugee crisis has changed all that. More than a million refugees entered Germany last year, unsettling many Germans and turning the AfD into a force on the national stage almost overnight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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