Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives face possible ejection from Berlin's state government in an election this weekend, while a nationalist party hopes for more gains at the expense of Germany's traditional political forces. Sunday's vote comes two weeks after Merkel's Christian Democratic Union was beaten into third place by the nationalist Alternative for Germany, or AfD, in the eastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, where Merkel has her parliamentary constituency. The CDU has long been weak in Berlin but another feeble result, though not immediately dangerous to Merkel, would keep up political pressure on the chancellor. Merkel's opening of Germany's borders to migrants last year featured prominently in Mecklenburg, although the influx has diminished drastically. The result there prompted her allies in Bavaria, the Christian Social Union, to step up a drive for tougher refugee policies — an internal dispute that isn't helping the conservatives' poll ratings. Merkel has defended her approach and, at a rally Wednesday, criticized opponents "who think that if you provoke, if you have snappy slogans ... problems will solve themselves." "It is not enough ... to know who is to blame, it is not enough just to know what you're against," she said. "We need good solutions that hold our society together." Local issues are more prominent in Berlin, a city of 3.5 million. That isn't good news for the governing parties: disillusionment is high over the capital's notoriously inefficient bureaucracy and issues such as years of delays in opening its new airport. — AP
