BAD DOBERAN: German Chancellor Angela Merkel (fourth right) and Christian Democrats’ top candidate Lorenz Caffier (left) pose with members of a shanty choir during an election campaign event in Bad Doberan, Germany, yesterday. —AP

BERLIN: German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose conservative party faces possible defeat in an election in her home state today, rejected charges by anti-immigrant critics that her government was spending less on Germans due to a large influx of refugees.

In an interview published in yesterday's edition of Bild newspaper, Merkel also strongly defended her decision, one year ago this weekend, to open the door to hundreds of thousands of refugees mostly fleeing conflicts in the Middle East. "We did not reduce benefits for anyone in Germany as a result of the aid for refugees. In fact, we actually saw social improvements in some areas," Merkel said.

"We took nothing away from people here. We are still achieving our big goal of maintaining and improving the quality of life in Germany," she said, a day before a critical vote in the eastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. The big influx of refugees and migrants has dragged her approval ratings to a five-year low of 45 percent, but Merkel was unapologetic and said, faced with the same situation today, she would act no differently.

"On that weekend (in 2015) it was not about opening the border for everyone, it was about not shutting it to those who had made their way to us from Hungary, on foot and in great need of help," she told Bild. Far fewer migrants are arriving in Germany now due to border closures in southeastern Europe and to a deal between Turkey and the European Union whereby Ankara agrees to take back people leaving its shores for Greece in return for accelerated EU accession talks and visa-free travel for Turks to the bloc.

"RIGHT THING TO DO"

Merkel, who is contemplating a bid for a fourth term as chancellor in next year's federal election, has cited intense efforts to integrate refugees through language courses and other help, but has also pressed for quicker deportations of those whose asylum applications have been denied.

The German government repatriated 21,000 people last year and 35,000 in the first seven months of 2016. "It's completely clear that a year like last year cannot be repeated, which is why we have taken the meaasures we have. But it was the right thing to do that we rose to this humanitarian responsibility and continue to do so," Merkel said.

Merkel's Christian Democrats are polling neck and neck in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern with the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which has been siphoning away conservative voters with its virulent anti-refugee stance.

She urged voters at an election rally in Bad Doberan, a small town in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, to keep the region's current centre-right coalition government in power. "It's going to be a tight race. Every vote counts."

Nationalists gain

Chancellor Angela Merkel's decision a year ago to open the borders to a surge of migrants is casting a long shadow over a state election this weekend in Germany's economically weak northeast, where an anti-immigration party is poised for strong gains.

Polls suggest that the 3-year-old Alternative for Germany can expect to win over 20 percent of votes today in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, a coastal region where Merkel has her parliamentary constituency. That would give it a chance of overtaking Merkel's conservatives for second place, and perhaps even finishing as the strongest party in the state legislature. That would be an embarrassment, though a manageable one, for the chancellor as she looks ahead to national elections next year.

The migrant influx that saw Germany register more than a million newcomers last year has divided Germans and helped reduce Merkel's popularity ratings from stellar to solid. New Year's Eve robberies and sexual assaults blamed largely on foreigners, and two attacks committed by asylum-seekers in July and claimed by the Islamic State group, have raised tensions.

The influx has slowed drastically this year. Merkel says the government has "worked incessantly," citing moves to toughen asylum rules and integrate refugees. She has stuck to her insistence, first voiced a year ago, that "we will manage" the refugee crisis.

Still, Alternative for Germany, or AfD, has thrived over recent months by opposing Merkel's approach. It fared well in three state elections in March. Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, a sparsely populated area of the formerly communist east, looks like fertile ground.

"There is an alliance of all parties under the chancellor's motto, 'We will manage it,' and we are the only ones who say we don't want to manage it at all," AfD deputy leader Alexander Gauland said this week. His party has no intention of going into government, and other parties won't work with it. Gauland said that while people in Mecklenburg may have no refugees in their villages, "they of course see on television, and in the streams that have come to Germany, there's a threat to what they feel is home."

He described Merkel's late-night decision on Sept. 4 last year, along with Austria's then-chancellor, to open the borders to migrants from Hungary as "dictatorial."

Such sentiments combine in Mecklenburg with long-standing resentment in rural areas that have seen facilities dwindle as the population shrinks, according to Hajo Funke, a political science professor at Berlin's Free University. The state's 9 percent unemployment rate is well above the 6.1 percent national average. - Agencies