Merkel’s Pyrrhic victory
Her party’s diminished majority raises global uncertainty
Germans are not the only ones to face the consequences of the diminished victory for Angela Merkel and her party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), and the Bavarian sister party Christian Social Union. With 33 per cent of the vote, this performance marks the party’s worst result since 1949. With US President Donald Trump rapidly ceding his country’s global leadership and the United Kingdom headed for instability as Brexit negotiations ricochet from one controversy to another, Ms Merkel, head of Europe’s largest and consistently fast-growing economy, was widely seen as the natural successor to the role of leader of the free world. Now, as she begins challenging coalition talks with two minor parties, which are disinclined to collaborate with each other, she stands weakened, raising levels of uncertainty within the European Union just as it faces an existential threat and global politics enters a period of instability.
Ms Merkel’s forceful endorsement of the Paris Climate Change agreement after Mr Trump repudiated it, and her robust support of the UN-brokered nuclear pact with Iran, which the US president wants to disavow, are vital signals in a world in which raw nationalism is ratcheting up global tensions. It is ironic, in fact, that the very qualities that raised Ms Merkel’s profile globally – such as her courageous decision to accept over a million West Asian refugees – contributed to the CDU’s diminishing domestic popularity, just as much as her globally unpopular implacability over Greek debt repayment earlier in her tenure raised her profile at home. It should be a matter of some concern that the perceived weakening of the CDU’s centre-right position, which a cynical refugee-exchange deal brokered between the EU and Turkey failed to leaven, has been the gain of the far-right Alternative for Germany (Afd). The party secured 13 per cent of the vote, marking the first time an openly nationalist party will enter the Bundestag in six decades.
Taken together with small but significant gains in elections this year by Marine Le Pen’s crudely anti-immigration National Front – eight parliamentary seats, up from two in 2012 – and the five-seat gain by the unprepossessing Geert Wilders and his anti-EU, anti-Islamic Party for Freedom in The Netherlands, right-wing nationalism appears to be gaining a toe-hold in Europe again. Indeed, in Germany, the centre-left Social Democratic Party appears to have been a bigger loser, gaining just 20 per cent of the vote, a historic low. Having declined to tie up with the CDU, the SPD will sit as the main Opposition in Parliament. All of which signals a clear message for Europe’s conservative/liberal politicians and Ms Merkel in particular: The time for realism has arrived. To ensure that illiberal forces do not hijack the discourse and sink Europe into the kind of populist chaos that is afflicting the US, she and leaders like her need to address in practical terms the popular fears, however irrational, of the demographic, economic and cultural pressures of immigrants, not to forget the plight of that small but vocal proportion of the population that has suffered the consequences of globalisation. The time for ideology may be over.