Merkel seeks partners in fractured political landscape

Chancellor Angela Merkel got down to work Tuesday in the fractured political landscape left by Germany’s “earthquake” election, seeking a ruling majority to help neutralize a newly empowered hard right.

Merkel was to hold meetings at the Bundestag lower house, where her conservative CDU/ CSU group saw its number of seats axed to 246 from 309 previously following its worst poll showing in seven decades.

Joining her at the glassdomed Reichstag parliament building for the first time were the 93 deputies of the Alternative for Germany, a party branded far-right by many German media outlets and officials.

“The language of the campaign is different than the one in parliament,” one of the party’s leading members, Alexander Gauland, told reporters outside the main chamber.

“We know that we have a big responsibility in parliament, also to our voters.”

Gauland, a CDU defector, had sparked outrage in the runup to the election for incendiary comments, including urging Germans to be “proud” of their WWII veterans and calling for a government official who is of Turkish origin to be “dumped in Anatolia.”

The Alternative for Germany (Afd) poached support from both mainstream camps, the conservatives and the Social Democrats (SPD), junior partners in the “grand coalition” that has led Germany for eight of Merkel’s 12 years in power.

A total of 5 million voters turned their backs on the governing parties, and 1.5 million of them voted for the Afd.

According to opinion polls, most of those voters pointed to anger over Merkel’s border policy, which allowed more than one million asylum seekers into the country since 2015.

But after the SPD scored a humiliating 20.5 percent, a post-war record, it ruled out further cooperation with Merkel, meaning her search for a ruling alliance became infinitely more complicated.

Commentators said Tuesday that Merkel’s only other option – trying a link-up with the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP) and the ecologist Greens – would be fraught with risk.