Following devastating results in September’s parliamentary elections, many politicians in Mrs Merkel’s CDU have woken up to the uncomfortable fact they are not as popular as they thought.
After their worst result since 1949, they are now doing their best not to be too closely associated with the chancellor, and are coming forward to denounce her controversial immigration policy in their numbers.
Lower Saxony, in north-west Germany, was seen as a likely win for the CDU. The challenger from Mrs Merkel’s party, Bernd Althusmann, appeared set to replace the Socialist regional president Stephan Weil.
However Der Spiegel reports Mr Althusmann is now on the defensive after realising the CDU’s popularity is in decline.
He said: “We would have liked to have more wind behind us.
“The refugee policy was misjudged. We have to make sure our values still align with the feelings of the population.”
While he previously seemed confident of a good result, Mr Althusmann is reportedly encouraging his supporters to wait and see what happens on the night.
Mrs Merkel backtracked on her open-door refugee policy this week in a deal with the CDU’s main coalition partner, its Bavarian sister party the CSU.
In a deal with CSU leader Horst Seehofer, the chancellor agreed to an upper immigration limit of 200,000 new arrivals per year, as well as strict new immigration criteria that would make it harder to settle in Germany.
However she was subjected to awkward questions about why the deal could not have been done sooner.
One reporter suggested Mrs Merkel had “failed” the German people by not dealing with the problem of immigration before the far-right anti-immigration party Alternative for Germany (AfD) had been elected to the national parliament.
CDU politicians fear it may be too little, too late for Mrs Merkel’s U-turn on open-door immigration, and are frantically seeking to distinguish themselves from the Chancellor to avoid replicating their disastrous national vote.
Germany’s regional elections will take place this Sunday.