Angela Merkel's hold on Germany tightens following key state victory

Germany's Social Democrat chief Martin Schulz admitted Monday that his party faces a "rocky road" to September national elections, after it was soundly beaten in a key state by Chancellor Angela Merkel's party.

German Chancellor and chairwoman of the German Christian Democratic Party (CDU) Angela Merkel smiles during a press conference at the party's headquarters in Berlin, Germany, Monday, May 15, 2017, one day after the election in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia.

Former President of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, the SPD's chancellor candidate looking to unseat Merkel in the national election in September, whose nomination earlier this year reinvigorated the Social Democrats, acknowledged the defeat. The CDU focused its campaign in the state, for decades an SPD stronghold, on attacking the SPD for failing to tackle local issues like crumbling infrastructure that causes huge traffic jams, rising crime and an underperforming education system.

But national opinion polls are showing her CDU now regaining political momentum.

The issue of a potential coal exit therefore hangs above the state, which generates over three quarters of its power from coal including some of Europe's biggest lignite-fired power plants operated by RWE and with Germany's last new hard-coal power plant expected to start operations next year - Uniper's 1 GW Datteln IV unit. But she added: "The national election campaign is only beginning now".

Social Democrat governor Hannelore Kraft's coalition lost its majority as her junior governing partners, the Greens, took only 6.4 percent.

Merkel said Monday that "we can not rest on our laurels regarding the current situation in Germany", but took a jab at the Social Democrats' approach.

According to Deutsche Welle, the voting in North Rhine-Westphalia serves as a kind of a general rehearsal of the election in the German Bundestag that is set to take place on September 24.

For the SPD this was not just the third regional election defeat in a row but also one of its worst ever results in the state with only 31% of the votes in Germany's industrial heartland held by the SPD for 45 of the past 50 years.

Last week, Merkel's CDU, which is allied with its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), scored another election victory in the state of Schleswig-Holstein.

During that period, the conservative CDU was in power only in 2005-2010, leading commentators to declare its Sunday's win historic.

"We need more police to secure the security of the people but we want as well to lead a country of integration". I come from the state in which we took a really stinging defeat today.