BERLIN (Reuters) - German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats were beaten into third place by the anti-immigrant and anti-Islam Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in a north-eastern state election on Sunday, TV exit polls showed.

In a stinging defeat for Merkel in her home district that could weaken her chances of a fourth term in next year’s federal elections, the upstart AfD took 21.9 percent of the vote behind the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) in their first election in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern by campaigning hard against the chancellor’s policies on refugees, according to a projection by ARD TV at 1.15 p.m. ET.

“This isn’t pretty for us,” said Michael Grosse-Broemer, one of Merkel’s top deputies in parliament in Berlin in a ZDF TV interview. “Those who voted for the AfD were sending a message of protest.”

Merkel’s approval rating has plunged to a five-year low of 45 percent, down from 67 percent a year ago, due to spreading disenchantment with her open-door policies on refugees.

According to a Der Spiegel magazine report, Merkel wanted to announce her intention of running for a fourth term this year but put that on hold due to resistance from her Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union. The arch-conservative CSU has demanded that Merkel put limits on the numbers of refugees.

“This was a dark day for Merkel,” Thomas Jaeger, a political scientist at Cologne University, told Reuters. “Everyone knows that she lost this election. Her district in parliament is there, she campaigned there, and refugees are her issue.”

The election took place exactly a year after Merkel’s decision to open Germany’s borders to hundreds of thousands of refugees and the discontent in the state was palpable.

“This is a slap in the face for Merkel — not only in Berlin but also in her home state,” said Frauke Petry, co-leader of the AfD. “The voters made a clear statement against Merkel’s disastrous immigration policies. This put her in her place.”

The AfD’s win was cheered by the leader of France’s far-right National Front party, Marine Le Pen, who posted on Twitter: “What was impossible yesterday has become possible: the patriots of AfD sweep up the party of Ms Merkel. All my congratulations!”

The SPD, which has ruled the rural state on the Baltic coast with the CDU as junior coalition partners since 2006, won 30.2 percent of the vote, down from 35.6 percent in the last election in 2011. The CDU won 19 percent, down from 23 percent in 2011, and its worst result ever in the state, ARD TV said.

The Left Party won 12.7 percent, down from 18.4 percent five years ago, while the Greens won 4.9 percent, down from 8.7 percent, and fell out of the assembly. The far-right NPD was also knocked out of the state legislature, falling below the 5 percent threshold for the first time since 2006.

Despite losing support, the SPD (26 seats) and the CDU (16) won enough seats to be able to continue their coalition in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, with the AfD as the second-largest bloc in the 71-seat state assembly with 18 seats. The SPD, which could also form a coalition with the Left Party, said it was leaving its options open.

Voters already punished Merkel in three state elections in March, voting in droves for the AfD and rejecting Merkel’s Christian Democrats.

Founded in 2013, the AfD now has won seats in nine of the 16 state assemblies across the country. However, it has no chance of governing in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern since the other parties have said they would not form a coalition with the party.

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The AfD is also making gains nationwide, a new poll showed on Sunday. If the national election were held next week, the AfD would win 12 percent of the vote, making it the third-largest party in Germany, according to a poll conducted by the Emnid institute for the Bild newspaper and published on Sunday.

Merkel had made a last-minute campaign appearance on Saturday in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, warning against the politics of “angst” offered by AfD with its virulent anti-refugee stance.</s>A year from now, Germany will be in the final stages of a general election that will shape European politics for the rest of this decade and beyond. With 12 months still to go, the question of whether Angela Merkel will lead her centre-right CDU party into that election is the great unknown. Mrs Merkel has been chancellor for 11 years and is nearing the end of her third term. She is globally respected and generally popular with voters, but she cannot go on forever. Her handling of the refugee question has shaken up German politics and damaged (though in some quarters burnished) her mystique, causing speculation that the Merkel era may be nearing its end.

The weekend elections in Germany’s most north-eastern region, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, were the latest lightning-rod for post-Merkel speculation, given a special twist by the fact that the chancellor herself sits for the region. The results on Sunday were unquestionably bad for the CDU, whose vote fell by 4% from 23% to 19%, slipping into third place behind the centre-left SPD on 31% and the anti-migrant AfD on 21%. The region will continue to be governed by a “grand coalition” of SPD and CDU, similar to the one that Mrs Merkel leads at federal level. Yet the setback has triggered the once unmentionable subject of the CDU adopting a new leader in time for the general election.

Objectively, there is not much basis for such speculation. The 4% fall in the CDU share in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern does not, on its own, justify real panic. All major parties lost vote share on Sunday. The AfD’s genuinely spectacular success has also been drawn from all parties, including from the Left party and the SPD. More enduringly, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is not typical of Germany as a whole. It is one of the poorest regions in the country and formerly part of communist East Germany. Markedly the strongest vote for the AfD, moreover, was in the extreme east, the poorest part of all. It has been a long time since the former DDR was the CDU stronghold that it was in the aftermath of German reunification.

It is of course true that the results in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern illustrate political trends that can be seen all over Europe, including Germany. Anti-migrant feeling has risen everywhere, as has racial tension. Dissatisfaction with national governments is widespread and hostility to the European Union has grown. But these trends take different and nuanced forms in each country and in each region of each country. Mrs Merkel is admired as well as disliked for her handling of the migrant situation. It is misleading to see everything in European domestic politics through the single prism of Brexit – or any other preoccupation.

Nevertheless there is absolutely no doubt that this result will be weighed alongside those in the upcoming regional contests in Lower Saxony and Berlin to form a general view of Mrs Merkel’s standing as the general election draws nearer. Nor is there much doubt that a politician who has dominated her country for so long will eventually and rightly come under pressure from a new generation. Mrs Merkel’s weaknesses are under the microscope at the moment. Yet the instinct for stability is strong in Germany and it would be foolish not to remember Mrs Merkel’s great strengths too, especially when there is little evidence yet that a different centre-right leader would win more support.</s>BERLIN, Sept 4 (Reuters) - The anti-immigrant Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) party is expected by polls to make huge gains in the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern state election on Sunday, reflecting a growing discontent with Chancellor Angela Merkel and her open-door refugee policy.

The election, taking place exactly a year after Merkel's decision to open Germany's borders to hundreds of thousands of refugees will be followed by another key vote in Berlin in two weeks and national elections next September.

Voters already punished Merkel in three state elections in March, voting in droves for the AfD and rejecting Merkel's Christian Democrats.

If the national election were held next week, The AfD would win 12 percent of the vote, making it the third-largest party in Germany according to a new poll conducted by the Emnid institute for the Bild newspaper and published on Sunday.

That would catapult the party into the German parliament for the first time since its creation in 2013.

Merkel, mulling a bid for a fourth term as chancellor, made a last-minute campaign appearance on Saturday in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, her home state, warning against the politics of "angst" offered by AfD with its virulent anti-refugee stance.

"Every vote counts," she said. "This election is about the future of this state." She urged voters to look beyond divisive campaign slogans and consider the policies of the current centre-right coalition that had halved unemployment and pumped up tourism in the northeastern coastal state.

In an interview in the mass-circulation Bild newspaper, Merkel defended her decision to welcome so many migrants fleeing conflict in the Middle East, and denied that the influx had cut funding for the German public.

Merkel's approval ratings have sunk to a five-year low of 45 percent over the past year, but the chancellor said she would act no differently if faced with the same situation today.

Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere, a fellow Christian Democrat, rejected criticism from some in the CDU's Christian Social Union (CSU) sister party that Merkel's refugee policy was responsible for the rise of the AfD party.

The Emnid poll said 63 percent of Germans believed that too.

"I consider that preposterous," he told the Welt am Sonntag newspaper. "The refugee crisis is not the reason that far-right populist parties are now making gains here. That has more to do with the anxiety that some have about globalisation and modernity."

A poll released by German broadcaster ZDF on Friday showed the AfD capturing 22 percent of the vote in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, which has 1.3 million eligible voters. The CDU was seen winning the same amount, while the Social Democrats, senior partner in the ruling coalition, was seen as likely to win 28 percent. (Editing by Greg Mahlich)</s>A nationalist, anti-immigration party performed strongly in a German state election Sunday in the region where Chancellor Angela Merkel has her political base, overtaking her conservatives to take second place amid discontent with her migrant policies, projections indicated.

The three-year-old Alternative for Germany, or AfD, won 21 to 22 percent of votes in the election for the state legislature in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, according to projections for ARD and ZDF television based on exit polls and partial counting. They put support for Merkel's Christian Democrats between 19 and 20 percent, their worst result yet in the state.

The center-left Social Democrats, who led the outgoing state government, were the strongest party with about 30-percent support.

Economically weak Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, in Germany's northeastern corner, is home to 1.6 million of the country's 80 million people and is a relative political lightweight. It is, however, the state where Merkel has her parliamentary constituency, and Sunday's regional vote was the first of five before a national election expected next September.

National AfD leader Frauke Petry celebrated "a blow to Angela Merkel." Local AfD leader Leif-Erik Holm told supporters: "Perhaps this is the beginning of the end of Angela Merkel's chancellorship today."

Merkel's refugee policies were a prominent issue in the campaign for Sunday's election, which came a year to the day after she decided to let migrants who were waiting in Hungary to travel to Germany — setting off the peak of last year's influx. Germany registered more than 1 million people as asylum-seekers last year.

New arrivals in Germany have slowed drastically this year, policies have been tightened and Mecklenburg is home to few foreigners. Still, New Year's Eve robberies and sexual assaults in Germany blamed largely on foreigners, as well as two attacks in July carried out by asylum-seekers and claimed by the Islamic State group, have fed tensions.

Merkel has stuck to her insistence that "we will manage" the refugee crisis, and has also said that "sometimes you have to endure such controversies."

"This result, and the strong performance of AfD, is bitter for many, for everyone in our party," said Peter Tauber, her Christian Democrats' general secretary.

He said the state government's positive record took a back seat for many voters, "because among a recognizable part, there was an explicit wish to voice displeasure and protest, and we saw that particularly strongly in the discussion about refugees."

Sunday's result could make it more difficult for Merkel to bury a festering dispute with the Christian Social Union, the Bavarian arm of her conservative bloc, which has long criticized her decision to open the borders and advocated an annual cap on migrants.

CSU general secretary Andreas Scheuer said that "we feel vindicated in our course."

Merkel has yet to say whether she will seek a fourth term next year, as is widely expected. While polls this year have shown her popularity slipping from stellar to merely solid, there is no obvious conservative alternative and her bloc is ahead nationally.

"She is, in people's perception, personally responsible for the border opening, and she has to deal with that," political science professor Karl-Rudolf Korte told ZDF television. "But she can deal with it — she has a year."

Mecklenburg was the only one of Germany's 16 states where the far-right National Democratic Party was represented in a state legislature, but it appeared to have lost its seats on Sunday. Its support dropped below the 5 percent needed to keep them, with many supporters apparently switching to AfD.

The state has been run for the past decade by the parties that currently run Germany. Popular Social Democratic governor Erwin Sellering has governed withMerkel's party as his junior partner. Both parties lost support compared with the last state election in 2011, when they polled 35.6 and 23 percent, respectively.

The opposition Left Party — once popular with protest voters — also lost support, slipping about six points to 12.5 percent. The left-leaning Greens were hovering around the 5 percent mark.

AfD is now represented in nine of Germany's 16 state legislatures and hopes to enter the national Parliament next year. Still, it fell well short Sunday of its aim of becoming the strongest party in Mecklenburg, and also didn't match the 24.3 percent support it won in another eastern state, Saxony-Anhalt, in March.

There's no realistic prospect at present of AfD going into government. Other parties won't deal with it.

The next regional election is Sept. 18 in Berlin, where local issues are likely to play a stronger role.</s>BERLIN -- A nationalist anti-immigration party performed strongly in a German state election Sunday in the region where Chancellor Angela Merkel has her political base, overtaking her conservatives to take second place.

The 3-year-old Alternative for Germany, or AfD, won 20.8 percent of votes in the election for the state legislature in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. Merkel's Christian Democrats polled 19 percent.

The center-left Social Democrats, who led the outgoing state government in a coalition with the conservatives, remained the strongest party, with 30.6 percent support.

Economically weak Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, in Germany's northeastern corner, is home to 1.6 million people and is a relative political lightweight. It is, however, the state where Merkel has her parliamentary constituency, and Sunday's regional vote was the first of five before a national election expected next September.

National Alternative for Germany leader Frauke Petry celebrated "a blow to Angela Merkel." Local party leader, Leif-Erik Holm told supporters: "Perhaps this is the beginning of the end of Angela Merkel's chancellorship today."

Merkel's refugee policies were a prominent issue in the campaign for Sunday's election, which came a year to the day after she decided to let in migrants from Hungary. Germany registered more than 1 million people as asylum seekers last year.

New arrivals in Germany have slowed drastically this year. Still, New Year's Eve robberies and sexual assaults in Germany blamed on foreigners, as well as two attacks in July carried out by asylum seekers and claimed by the Islamic State group, have fed tensions.

Merkel has stuck to her insistence that "we will manage" the migrant crisis."

"This result, and the strong performance of AfD, is bitter for many, for everyone in our party," said Peter Tauber, her Christian Democrats' general secretary.

He said the state government's positive record took a back seat for many voters, "because among a recognizable part, there was an explicit wish to voice displeasure and protest, and we saw that particularly strongly in the discussion about refugees."

Merkel has yet to say whether she will seek a fourth term next year.

"She is, in people's perception, personally responsible for the border opening, and she has to deal with that," political science professor Karl-Rudolf Korte told ZDF television.

The state has been run for the past decade by the parties that currently run Germany. Popular Social Democratic governor Erwin Sellering has governed with Merkel's party as his junior partner. Both parties lost support compared with the previous state election in 2011.

Alternative for Germany is now represented in nine of Germany's 16 state legislatures and hopes to enter the national Parliament next year. Still, it fell short of its aim of becoming the strongest party in Mecklenburg, and also didn't match the 24.3 percent support it won in another eastern state, Saxony-Anhalt, in March.

The next regional election is Sept. 18 in Berlin.</s>Voting began on Sunday in the German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, where polls project the anti-immigrant Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) party will make huge gains amid growing discontent with Chancellor Angela Merkel and her open-door refugee policy.

The election, taking place exactly a year after Merkel’s decision to open Germany’s borders to hundreds of thousands of refugees, will be followed by another key vote in Berlin in two weeks and national elections next September.

Voters already punished Merkel in three state elections in March, voting in droves for the AfD and rejecting Merkel’s Christian Democrats.

Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is a small coastal state in northeastern Germany with just 1.3 million eligible voters, but losses there would be humiliating for Merkel, who has her own electoral district in the state.

The AfD, founded two years after the last election in the state, is expected to capture 22 percent of the vote, the same as Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), junior partner in the state’s ruling coalition, according to a poll by broadcaster ZDF.

The Social Democrats, senior partners in the state’s ruling coalition, are expected to win 28 percent of the vote, compared with 35.6 percent in the last state-wide election in 2011.

The AfD is also making gains nationwide, a new poll showed Sunday. If the national election were held next week, The AfD would win 12 percent of the vote, making it the third-largest party in Germany, according to a poll conducted by the Emnid institute for the Bild newspaper and published on Sunday.

That would catapult the party into the German parliament for the first time since its creation in 2013.

Merkel, mulling a bid for a fourth term as chancellor, made a last-minute campaign appearance on Saturday in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, warning against the politics of “angst” offered by AfD with its virulent anti-refugee stance.

“Every vote counts,” she said. “This election is about the future of this state.” She urged voters to look beyond divisive campaign slogans and consider the policies of the current coalition that had halved unemployment and pumped up tourism in the northeastern coastal state.

In an interview in the mass-circulation Bild newspaper, Merkel defended her decision to welcome so many migrants fleeing conflict in the Middle East, and denied the influx had cut funding for the German public.

Merkel’s approval ratings have sunk to a five-year low of 45 percent over the past year, but the chancellor said she would act no differently if faced with the same situation today.

Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere, a fellow Christian Democrat, rejected criticism from some in the CDU’s Christian Social Union (CSU) sister party that Merkel’s refugee policy was responsible for the rise of the AfD party.

The Emnid poll said 63 percent of Germans believed that too.

“I consider that preposterous,” he told the Welt am Sonntag newspaper. “The refugee crisis is not the reason that far-right populist parties are now making gains here. That has more to do with the anxiety that some have about globalisation and modernity.”</s>BERLIN, Sept 3 (Reuters) - European Central Bank President Mario Draghi will address a German parliamentary committee on Sept. 28 to discuss monetary policy, a spokeswoman for the bank said on Saturday.

Draghi will give a short speech to the European committee of the German Bundestag, followed by questions, the Frankfurter Allgemeinen Sonntagszeitung reported in its Sunday issue, quoting the head of the committee, Gunther Krichbaum.

Krichbaum told the paper, which first reported the date for the meeting, that the finance and budget committees would also take part, but Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble would not attend.

Relations between Europe's largest economy and the ECB have been tense due to criticisms made by German government officials, who argue that the ECB's ultra easy monetary policy is eroding the savings of thrifty Germans and eroding profit margins for banks.

Schaeuble has also blamed the ECB's policies for the recent rise of a right-wing anti-immigration party, Alternative for Germany, which is poised to make huge gains in Sunday's election in the northern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.

The ECB's spokeswoman said Draghi had last spoken in the German parliament in 2012. He has also spoken to the Spanish, French, Italian and Finnish national parliaments, she said.

German lawmakers had invited Draghi in the spring after he responded sharply to their criticism of monetary policy, and he quickly accepted the invitation. (Reporting by Andrea Shalal)</s>BERLIN (AP) — Chancellor Angela Merkel's center-left deputy is accusing her conservatives of being too slow to respond to the migrant crisis following a state election in which a nationalist, anti-immigration party beat Merkel's party into third place.

Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel's Social Democrats won Sunday's election in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, where Merkel has her parliamentary constituency. It was the first of five regional votes before a national election expected next September.

The three-year-old Alternative for Germany drew supporters from across the spectrum to finish second with 20.8 percent of votes. Merkel's welcome for refugees a year ago was a prominent issue.

Social Democratic Party , SPD, chairman Sigmar Gabriel speaks about the results of the state elections in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Sunday Sept. 4, 2016. The center-left Social Democrats, who lead the outgoing state government, were expected to be the strongest party with about 30 percent support. ( Britta Pedersen/dpa via AP)

Merkel has insisted that "we will manage" the crisis. Gabriel said Monday that "we have to do it too" and that "we have wasted a great deal of time with unnecessary arguments."

Workers remove an election poster of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's CDU top candidate Lorenz Caffier for the election in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Monday, Sept. 5, 2016. The nationalist, anti-immigration party Alternative for Germnany, AfD, has performed strongly in the state election Sunday in the region where Merkel has her political base, overtaking her conservatives to take second place amid discontent with her migrant policies. (Christian Charisius/dpa via AP)</s>Immigrant men have groped and sexually assaulted a number of women in a German city in copycat attacks of the New Year's eve sex frenzy in Cologne.

Police said the four women who filed complaints after the incidents in Essen late on Friday could be 'only the tip of the iceberg.'

Women who may have been attacked at the Essen Original city party have been offered a confidential hotline by officers to contact them.

The police presence at the festival was beefed up over the weekend as a result of the sexual assaults.

All said that men came up to them in groups, danced around them, harassed and groped them.

This mirrored the attacks in Cologne on December 31 when mobs of North African migrants assaulted hundreds of women in attacks which served to turn Germany against the open-door refugee policy of Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Despite defending her record in a long interview on Saturday with the BILD newspaper, the chancellor is braced for a beating at the hustings on Sunday when the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is set to defeat her own CDU conservatives in a regional election in her home state.

Police said the Essen victims were attacked in three parts of the city by North African men in groups of four and six 'who drove their victims into corners and groped them all over.'

Most of the abusers are still being hunted but police apprehended several lone suspects shortly after the complaints were made. Two 16-year-olds and a 46-year-old man were questioned but later released.

Police spokesman Peter Elke said: 'The heavy police presence on the ground meant we could promptly identify and arrest some suspected attackers.' All suspects are immigrants or of a migrant background.

Elke added: 'The sequence of events has to be determined. Therefore we are looking for witnesses to the attacks as enquiries continue.'

The festival continued on Sunday and will end on Monday night.

Organisers have promised to work with police to provide greater security for women in the hours of darkness when bands play and people stroll among food stands, acrobats and street artists.

The news could not have come at a worse time for the chancellor as the AfD is set to score a bigger percentage of the vote in her home state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern on Sunday.

Thousands of CDU supporters have defected to the AfD as a direct result of her immigration policy. The AfD wants an end to refugee immigration.</s>German Chancellor Angela Merkel acknowledged on Monday that her pro-refugee policies led to her party’s state election rout on Sunday but said they would not be jettisoned even though her Bavarian ally is clamouring for change.

In a rare, self-critical reflection over a state election defeat, Merkel insisted three times in the space of a four-minute statement in China that her decision to open the gate for refugees last year was right and would not be changed.

“I’m also responsible, obviously,” Merkel said, breaking her rule against speaking on domestic issues while outside Germany as she was on a visit to China. “But I believe the fundamental decisions made in the past months are the right decisions.”

The poor showing of Merkel’s Christian Democratic (CDU) party in the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern state vote has raised questions about her hopes of winning – or even running – for a fourth term in the 2017 general election.

Her refusal to change course on refugees deepened a split with the arch-conservative Christian Social Union (CSU), the Bavarian sister party of the CDU. After Sunday’s vote, CSU leaders quickly renewed an internecine battle with calls for limits on refugees.

The CDU suffered one of its worst electoral defeats when it fell to third place in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern behind the centre-left Social Democrats and anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD).

“I’m extremely dissatisfied with the election result,” she said, noting refugees had overwhelmed local issues in the rural north-eastern state that has been her home district since 1990.

It was the first time the CDU lost to a far-right party in a state election, winning a paltry 19 per cent, according to preliminary final results. The SPD won with 30.6 per cent while the AfD scored a historic win over the CDU with 20.8 percent.

The AfD played on the public’s angst that refugees, some 70 per cent of whom are Muslims, are overrunning Germany, siphoning away housing, resources and jobs from Germans. Merkel rejected that argument, saying no funds were taken away for refugees.

Fears of terrorism run high among AfD supporters after two refugees carried out Islamic State-inspired attacks in July.

“Everyone’s got a lot of thinking to do about winning voters back, and that means first of all me, of course,” said Merkel, who has won the last three federal elections since 2005 but has had to delay her announcement of a run for a fourth term because of CSU opposition, according to Der Spiegel newsmagazine.

Her approval ratings fell 22 points to a five-year low at 45 per cent in the year since she opened the gates to more than a million refugees, mainly from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, drawn by Germany’s famed prosperity, order and stability.

The CSU has been railing against Merkel’s steadfast opposition to putting limits on the number of refugees even though Germany took in more than the rest of Europe combined in 2015. Incoming refugee numbers have dropped sharply this year.

There have been rumours that the powerful CSU leader, Bavaria state premier Horst Seehofer, is considering a run for chancellor in 2017 instead of supporting Merkel’s candidacy. That threat had always been thwarted in the past by CDU warnings that it would then run its own campaign in Bavaria.

“We need a change of direction in Berlin,” Bavarian state Finance Minister Markus Soeder told the Bild daily. “The voice of the people can’t be ignored any longer.”

CSU General Secretary Andreas Scheuer, Seehofer’s right-hand man, demanded Merkel drop her opposition to limits on refugees. “It’s obvious who’s to blame for this election – not the CSU.”

Grumbling in CDU ranks is also growing as many fear a drubbing in next year’s federal election would cost it dozens of seats in parliament. The CDU/CSU has slid some eight points to 33 percent in the last year, Infratest Dimap said last week.

“Peoples’ confidence in the chancellor has been badly shaken,” said Erika Steinbach, a CDU MP. “It’s hard to tell if that can be repaired by the election.”
Voters in the federal German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern head to the polls in a regional election to elect members to the Landtag of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. The latest polling indicates the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) are expected to gain strongly.