Votes might indicate Merkel’s chances

State elections seen as harbingers of national race in fall.

Germans in the northernmost state of Schleswig-Holstein voted Sunday in the first of two state elections that are widely viewed as harbingers of the national race this fall, in which Chancellor Angela Merkel is seeking a fourth term.

Local issues have dominated the race, in which 2.3 million voters are eligible to cast ballots for the state legislature. Germans in the country’s most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia, will vote next week in another state election seen as an indicator of the national mood before the entire country elects a new Parliament on Sept. 24.

Schleswig-Holstein and North Rhine-Westphalia have been led by the center-left Social Democrats, who are junior partners in Merkel’s national coalition. Though the chancellor’s center-right Christian Democrats have held power in Parliament since 2005, her party has suffered a string of defeats in a number of the country’s 16 states over that period.

“For Angela Merkel, an election victory for her party would be a turning point,” the conservative daily Die Welt wrote in an editorial. “For the first time since the beginning of her chancellorship in 2005, the Christian Democrats could reconquer one of the states they’ve lost.”

Even as their European partners have expressed displeasure with a more centralized European Union and the threat of increased immigration of hundreds of thousands of migrants from the Middle East and Africa, Germans have largely tended to support stability at the ballot box. In March, voters in Saarland, Germany’s smallest state, returned Merkel’s center-right party to power with 40.7 percent of the vote.

This was the first indication that her main rival, Martin Schulz, leader of the Social Democrats and a former European Parliament president, may not have the staying power through to the fall, despite driving support for his party over the Christian Democrats at the start of the year.

The latest polls show Merkel’s party leading the Social Democrats by about 8 points as the chancellor campaigns.

The nationalist, populist Alternative for Germany is uncertain of passing the 5 percent threshold needed to make it into the state legislature in Schleswig-Holstein. Failure to do so would send a signal that the upstart party — which rode a wave of anger and uncertainty over Merkel’s refugee policy — is weakened as it heads into the national campaign.