Bruised By Refugee Crisis, Merkel Faces Tough Election Year

BERLIN, Nov 2 (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 02nd Nov, 2016 ) : Germany's mass refugee influx may have abated, but the fears and tensions it stoked loom large as a weakened Chancellor Angela Merkel is expected to lead her party into a tough election year.

When her Bavarian allies the CSU kick off the 2017 campaign season with a party congress Friday, Merkel, for the first time in her 16 years at the helm of the ruling CDU party, won't be on the guest list.

Merkel's absence is a sign of the lingering rancour over her open-door migrant policy that brought almost 900,000 asylum seekers to Europe's top economy last year, most of them passing through Bavaria.

At the height of the influx, Merkel endured a humiliating, almost 15-minute dressing down on the stage of the CSU congress by its leader, Bavarian state premier Horst Seehofer.

While Merkel's welcome to refugees won her many plaudits, it also stoked deep anxieties and boosted a new party to the right of the arch-conservative CSU -- the populist Alternative for Germany (AfD).

Railing openly against migrants, islam and the establishment parties, the AfD is the dark horse in the September 2017 election and currently polling at around 12 percent. It only narrowly missed Germany's five-percent hurdle for entry into parliament in 2013 and has since won opposition seats in 10 of Germany's 16 state assemblies.

The CSU, not to be outdone in talking tough on immigration, wants Germany to favour migrants from the "Christian-occidental cultural sphere", ban full-face Islamic veils and set an upper limit of 200,000 refugees a year -- a demand Merkel has consistently rejected.