Many of the headlines about the three state elections in Germany over the weekend follow a similar theme:
—Setback for Angela Merkel as Far Right Makes Gains in Germany
—Angela Merkel’s CDU suffers German state election setbacks
—German elections: setbacks for Merkel’s CDU as anti-refugee AfD makes big gains
—Angela Merkel’s party suffers in German state votes as she faces most serious challenge to her power
And those stories attribute the performance of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) to the chancellor’s open-door policy for refugees fleeing the civil war in Syria, and indeed Merkel herself acknowledged a “difficult day” for the party. A closer reading of the results present a more complicated picture, however.
Merkel’s CDU governed one of the states, Saxony-Anhalt, up for play in the regional elections. The other two, Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate, were governed by a center-left coalition of Social Democrats and Greens. In other words, Merkel’s CDU was a challenger in those two states. It lost in both, though it was expected to win in Baden-Württemberg, a former stronghold.
In both Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate, the CDU candidates were vocal opponents of Merkel’s position on Syrian refugees. Indeed, the victors in both these places, the ruling center-left coalition, strongly supported Merkel’s policy. In Baden-Württemberg, nearly 8 in 10 voters said they supported welcoming refugees, according to exit polls; in Rhineland-Palatinate, the exit polls showed, nearly a third said they switched their support from the CDU to the Greens because of their more posture toward refugees.