A nationalist, anti-migration party powered into three German state legislatures in elections Sunday held amid divisions over Chancellor Angela Merkel’s liberal approach to the refugee crisis, projections showed.
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, according to projections for ARD and ZDF television based on exit polls and early counting.