German Chancellor Angela Merkel's party was reeling Monday after another stinging poll loss, as an upstart populist party poached votes in a Berlin state election by railing against her open-door refugee policy.With one year to go until an expected general election, Merkel's conservatives were licking their wounds after being turfed out of the left-right coalition government in the capital, Germany's biggest city.It was the fifth regional poll in a row showing losses for the Christian Democrats (CDU) that Merkel will have to answer for, as voter angst over the arrival of 1 million refugees and migrants last year shakes her once firm standing with the electorate.Markus Soeder, a vocal critic from her conservative bloc, called the vote a "massive wake-up call" for her to impose strict limits on migration."The Christian Union risks a lasting and giant loss of trust among its core voters," the Bavaria state finance minister told the Bild daily.The Berlin vote continued a trend of a fracturing of the electorate and surging support for fringe parties, with both the far left and the right wing the winners of the day.It also mirrored the march of anti-migrant parties in France, Austria and the Netherlands and Republican maverick Donald Trump in the United States.The strong AfD result meant it has now won opposition seats in 10 of Germany's 16 states. Its string of victories indicates that for the first time since World War II, a party to the right of the CDU has established a foothold in German politics."We are firmly convinced that we will land in the Bundestag [national parliament] with a double-digit score" next year, AfD co-leader Joerg Meuthen said.Berlin's SPD Mayor Michael Mueller had dramatically warned before the polls that a strong AfD result would be "seen throughout the world as a sign of the resurgence of the right and of Nazis in Germany."Merkel's CDU won just 18 percent – its worst post-war result in the city, before or after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall – likely spelling the end of its term as junior coalition partner to the Social Democrats (SPD), who won just under 22 percent."The CDU lost, but this time it is not primarily a defeat for the chancellor," news website Spiegel Online wrote. But it noted that although the AfD had fallen short of its own goal of a second-place finish, "the right-wing populists, sad but true, now belong to the new normal in Germany."Political scientist Karl-Rudolf Korte of the University of Duisburg-Essen said the series of setbacks would force Merkel to focus on shoring up domestic support at the expense of international crisis management. "Merkel will stay in Germany more and travel abroad less, to explain her policies to citizens and why they should vote for her again next year," he told public broadcaster ZDF.