Merkel at helm as far-right bites back
Leader’s readiness to support popular policy holds centre but she cedes ground on right
BERLIN— Even as her global stature grows, longtime German Chancellor Angela Merkel may find her wings somewhat clipped at home.
Sunday’s election, which bookends a year of high-stakes contests in Europe, looks set to saddle Merkel, and the government she leads, with forceful opposition from the far right, as the nationalist, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party (AfD) claimed the third-largest share of votes. The challenge could define her fourth term.
“Of course we were hoping for a better result,” Merkel said in brief remarks at her party’s headquarters. “We want to win back the AfD voters by registering their worries and their fears.”
Politicians on the right flank of her conservative bloc offered a more blunt conclusion.
“We made the mistake of leaving our right flank somewhat open,” Horst Seehofer, the chairperson of the Christian Social Union, the Bavarian counterpart of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), told the public broadcaster ARD. He clashed with Merkel over her liberal stance to the refugee crisis that buffeted Germany in 2015.
If Merkel completes her fourth term, she will have led Europe’s most powerful economy for 16 years, making her the longest-serving head of a major European state since Helmut Kohl, her mentor and the architect of German reunification in 1990. Merkel, 63, is the lone woman to have held the role and the only German chancellor from the former communist east.
She has governed alongside three American and four French presidents, as well as four British, six Italian and seven Japanese prime ministers. She led Europe’s response to the 2008-2009 financial crisis, confronted Russian President Vladimir Putin over his country’s annexation of Crimea and refused to close Germany’s borders as hundreds of thousands of refugees, mostly Syrians, set their sights on northern Europe.
The unassuming daughter of a Lutheran pastor who spent half her life shut off from the West, Merkel is perhaps today’s leading voice for the political, economic and security arrangements put into place after the Second World War that define the liberal Western order.
Merkel, however, has not inoculated Germany from the electoral volatility undermining the political establishment and fomenting rage against incumbents in democracies across Europe. She has nevertheless managed to channel these forces at least partially to her advantage, preserving her command over the political mainstream while raising questions about the future of German politics when Merkel stands down.
Her party received a much lower share of the vote than it did in 2013 — 33 per cent, according to projections, compared with 41.5 per cent four years ago — and support for extreme factions mounted.
Her nonideological style of gover- nance has made her Christian Democratic Union a catch-all for centrist interests while paralyzing its main rival, the Social Democratic Party, which captured just 21per cent of the vote, according to early returns.
Her apparent readiness to back any broadly popular policy has solidified the political centre, but it has also ceded ground on the right to the AfD, which was projected to have won13.3 per cent of the vote. Founded as an anti-euro party in 2013, the AfD made opposition to Merkel’s refugee policy the focal point of its campaign and will become the first far-right party in the German Parliament since the early 1960s.
Merkel has ruled out governing in a coalition with the AfD and her allies say she will not be bullied to move further to the right by the noisy party, whose main project is demonizing her.
“She is not willing to take decisions closer to what the AfD is asking for,” said Jurgen Hardt, a Christian Democratic lawmaker from North Rhine—Westphalia and foreign policy spokesperson for Merkel’s ruling coalition.
But the chancellor’s campaign shied away from a well-defined argument for Germany’s future, seeking mainly to immobilize her opponents and flex the power of her personal brand.
She opted for a prominent use of Germany’s national colours in the party’s campaign material at the end of last year, an effort to blunt the nationalist appeal of the AfD after it surpassed her party in a state election. Meanwhile, she backed her party’s call for a partial ban on the fullface veil worn by some Muslim women.
When her Social Democratic challenger, Martin Schulz, ramped up his attacks on U.S. President Donald Trump ahead of his decision to pull the United States out of the Paris climate accord, Merkel distanced herself from the White House, telling supporters in a Bavarian beer tent, “We Europeans truly have to take our fate into our own hands.” And when several potential coalition partners suggested that support for the legalization of same-sex marriage would be a condition of their co-operation in the new government, Merkel ceased blocking the matter, allowing it to pass in a snap vote, even though she personally opposed legalization.
“She’s very good at collecting information,” said Thomas Strerath, head of the advertising agency that designed her campaign materials, Jung von Matt. “She gets into the details, she hesitates and then she makes her final decision in the very last moment.”
This is roughly the process by which Merkel, in September 2015, decided not to close Germany’s borders to a torrent of asylum seekers rushing into Europe, according to German journalist Robin Alexander’s new account, whose title can be translated as The Driven Ones: Merkel and Refugee Politics. Operating largely independently of leading members of her party and guided by favourable polling, Merkel made a pragmatic decision to keep Germany’s borders open and became the face of Europe’s ultimately haphazard response to the refugee crisis.