Here is hoping the AfD exceeds expectations today:
Voting began on Sunday in the German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, where polls show the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party making huge gains amid growing discontent with Chancellor Angela Merkel and her open-door refugee policy.
The election, taking place exactly a year after Merkel’s decision to open Germany’s borders to hundreds of thousands of refugees, will be followed by another key vote in Berlin in two weeks and national elections next September.
Voters already punished Merkel in three state elections in March, voting in droves for the AfD and rejecting Merkel’s Christian Democrats.
Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is a small coastal state in northeastern Germany with just 1.3 million eligible voters, but losses there would be humiliating for Merkel, who has her own electoral district in the state.
Founded two years after the last election in the state in 2011, the AfD is expected to capture 22 percent of the vote, the same as Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), junior partner in the state’s ruling coalition, according to a poll by broadcaster ZDF.
I’m putting this up just to confirm what the expectations actually were, before the media starts attempting minimize the significance of whatever happens.