Nationalists strong, setback for Merkel party in German vote

A nationalist, anti-migration party powered into three German state legislatures in elections on March 13 held amid divisions over Chancellor Angela Merkel's liberal approach to the refugee crisis. Merkel's conservatives lost to center-left rivals in two states they had hoped to win.

The elections in the prosperous southwestern state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, neighboring Rhineland-Palatinate and relatively poor Saxony-Anhalt in the ex-communist east were the first major political test since Germany registered nearly 1.1 million people as asylum-seekers last year.

The three-year-old Alternative for Germany, or AfD - which has campaigned against Merkel's open-borders approach - easily entered all three legislatures.

AfD won 15.1 percent of the vote in Baden-Wuerttemberg, official results showed. It scored about 12.5 percent in Rhineland-Palatinate and 24 percent in Saxony-Anhalt, where it finished second, according to projections by ARD and ZDF television with most districts counted.

"We are seeing above all in these elections that voters are turning away in large numbers from the big established parties and voting for our party," AfD leader Frauke Petry said.

They "expect us finally to be the opposition that there hasn't been in the German parliament and some state parliaments," she added.

There were uncomfortable results both for Merkel's conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and their partners in the national government, the center-left Social Democrats (SPD). The traditional rivals are Germany's two biggest parties.

"The democratic center in our country has not become stronger, but smaller, and I think we must all take that seriously," said Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel, the Social Democrats'...