Germany’s Merkel faces tricky coalition after ‘nightmare win’
Antiimmigrant AfD emerges third largest with 12.6%, other major parties rule out working with it
German Chancellor Angela Merkel huddled with her party on Monday after winning a fourth term with a far weaker score, now facing the double headache of an emboldened nationalist opposition party and thorny coalition talks ahead.
If the campaign was widely decried as boring, its outcome was a bombshell — a populist hard-right surge poached votes from Merkel’s conservatives as well as the centre-left Social Democrats, handing both their worst results in decades.
“A nightmare victory for Merkel,” said Germany’s topselling daily Bild. “The governing parties and the chancellor squandered the people’s faith in them.”
After 12 years in power and running on a promise of stability and economic strength, Merkel’s CDU/CSU bloc scored 33%, according to final results, against 20.5% for the Social Democrats under challenger Martin Schulz, who pledged to go into the opposition.
The election marked a breakthrough for the anti-Islam Alternative for Germany (AfD), which with 12.6% became the third strongest party and vowed to “go after” Merkel over her migrant and refugee policy.
News weekly Der Spiegel said Merkel had no one but herself to blame for the bruising she got from voters.
“Angela Merkel deserved this defeat,” the magazine’s Dirk Kurbjuweit wrote, accusing her of running an “uninspired” cam- paign and “largely ignoring the challenges posed by the right”.
The entry of around 90 hardright nationalist MPs to the glassdomed Bundestag chamber breaks a taboo in post-World War 2 Germany.
“We will take our country back,” vowed the AfD’s jubilant Alexander Gauland, who has recently urged Germans to be proud of their war veterans.
While joyful supporters of the AfD — a party with links to the far-right French National Front and Britain’s UKIP — sang the German anthem at a Berlin club on Sunday, hundreds of protesters shouted “Nazis out!”
But just hours after its triumph, the party’s long-simmering infighting between radical and more moderate forces spilled out into the open at a dramatic morning news conference.
AfD co-leader Frauke Petry stunned her colleagues by saying she would not join the party’s parliamentary group and would serve as an independent MP. She then abruptly left the room in a move Gauland criticised as “excessively feisty”.
All other political parties have ruled out working with the AfD, whose leaders call Merkel a “traitor” for allowing in more than one million asylum seekers since the height of the refugee influx in 2015.