Angela Merkel's CDU suffers Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania poll blow

Mrs Merkel is in China for the G20 summit

Angela Merkel's ruling CDU party has been beaten into third place by an anti-immigrant and anti-Islam party in elections in a north-eastern German state.

The Alternative fuer Deutschland (AfD) party took just under 21% of the vote behind the centre-left SPD's 30%. The German chancellor's CDU was backed by only 19% of voters, its worst ever result in the state.

Local AfD leader Leif-Erik Holm, a former radio presenter, said his party had achieved a "proud result"

The vote was seen as a key test before German parliamentary elections in 2017. Before the vote in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, in the former East Germany, all of Germany's other parties ruled out forming a governing coalition with the AfD.

 But the party, formed only three years ago, is already represented in nine of Germany's 16 state parliaments.

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One leading CDU politician called the result catastrophic, while another, Wolfgang Bosbach, said the arrival of hundreds of thousands of migrants without documents had "put the wind in the AfD's sails".