German voters make drastic changes in three state parliaments

Frauke Petry led her party, Alternativ für Deutschland, to a great victory yesterday against the established political order in Germany.

AfD anti-immigrant party takes second and third place in German elections in three states

The party that is considered the biggest loser in the elections is Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU).

Alternativ für Deutschland surprised on the upside by getting 15.1% of the vote in Green Party/CDU stronghold Baden-Wüttemberg in Sunday's state election, beating out the SPD (Social Democrats) to give it the 3rd largest number of seats in the B-W legislature.

In SPD stronghold Rhineland-Palatinate, the right-leaning party won an impressive 12.6%, giving it the third place finish. Parties need to reach 5% in order to gain seats in the state parliaments.

Most impressive of all, in the former East Germany, in Saxony-Anhalt the new party reached 2nd place - only 5 points under the leading CDU (Merkel's center-right party)! AfD – 24.2% ; CDU – 29.8% ; with the Left Party (former Communist Party) coming in third with 16.3% and the SPD managing only 10.6%.

Of course, as in our U.S. primary elections right now, all the parties work together against anti-immigration candidates and they have all said they will not form a coalition with the AfD under any circumstances. In Europe, most governments (even state governments) are made up of coalitions of two parties, so how this all turns out will be interesting to watch.

A real conservative party is established

Swiss daily Blick told its German-speaking readers that "Germany is torn," calling the ballots a twin vote of no-confidence - both in terms of refugee policy and grand coalition government more generally. It noted how the historic fear of the CDU and especially its Bavarian CSU sister party had come to pass - that a party had established itself to the right of Germany's conservatives.

"For the first time, in the shape of the AfD, a party to the right of the Union has won a lasting foothold, and now sits in eight out of 16 state parliaments. In Saxony-Anhalt the party achieved a real first: it claimed more than 20 percent of the vote and became the second largest power," Blick's Iris Mayer wrote.

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For its part, the AfD declined to draw parallels with right-wing parties in the rest of Europe, and distanced itself from the Front National in France.

During a testy exchange with reporters at a press conference in Berlin on Monday, leader Frauke Petry said that the "endless label debate" was less productive than talking about policies, while spokesman Jörg Meuthen said that the French party had shown nationalist and socialist tendencies which the AfD did not share.

Addressing the allegations of the "lying press" that her supporters have leveled against the media, Petry called for journalists to take a "less ideological approach" to its reporting on the AfD.

Saturday in Berlin:

On the day before elections, Saturday March 12, 3000 to 5000 marchers demonstrated against Merkel's open-door migrant policy in Berlin. It drew 10 times more people than police had expected! Those men in black in the front are not "Nazi's" - they are the police.

Counter-demonstrators came from left-wing groups, unions, churches and Germany's Turkish Association.

Pegida today Watch livestream from the Altmarkt in Dresden:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WhXye5nij58