MERKEL HEADS FOR EASY WIN
Chancellor seeks fourth term, hard-right eyes entry into Parliament
CHANCELLOR Angela Merkel was expected to cruise to victory in elections yesterday but also to face the breakthrough into Parliament of hard-right populists for the first time in Germany’s post-war history.
Voting began at 0600 GMT (2pm here yesterday) in Europe’s biggest economy and exit polls are announced at 1600 GMT. Few expect surprises, given Merkel’s double-digit poll lead.
For months, the woman now dubbed the “eternal chancellor” has been the favourite over her centre-left rival Martin Schulz and looked set to win another term and match the 16-year reign of her mentor Helmut Kohl.
To many in the West, a fourth Merkel victory will come as a relief in a turbulent world, with hopes she will serve as a calmheaded counterweight to United States President Donald Trump and Russia’s Vladimir Putin and as the key EU ally to French President Emmanuel Macron.
But the election is also expected to mark a milestone for the four-year-old Alternative for Germany (AfD) which, like rightwing populists elsewhere, rails against migrants, Muslims and mainstream parties.
It has been polling at 11-13 per cent and could become Germany’s third strongest party, driven by anger over the influx of one million migrants and refugees, many from war-torn Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, since 2015.
“The AfD’s entry into the Bundestag marks an epochal step forward for the far right,” said Joerg Forbrig of think-tank the German Marshall Fund of the US. By entering parliament, he said, “the xenophobic, revisionist and anti-European political force” would have heightened visibility and access to campaign finance, dozens of offices and hundreds of staff.
After a “vicious” campaign, in which the AfD demanded an end to German guilt over two world wars, Forbrig warned in an article for Politico that “German democracy is about to face its biggest stress test ever”.
At Merkel’s final major stump speech on Friday in Munich, rightwing activists tried to drown her out with whistles and vuvuzelas and chants of “get lost”.
But the 63-year-old refused to be derailed from her stabilityand-prosperity mantra, telling the crowd that “the future of Germany will definitely not be built with whistles and hollers”.
Schulz, for his part, recalled with pride the Social Democratic Party’s history of resisting the Nazi regime and told a Berlin rally that “this Alternative for Germany is no alternative. They are a shame for our nation”.
Aside from the populist noise, the past two months of campaigning have been criticised as lacklustre, with few hot-button issues dividing the main contenders.
The more outspoken Schulz, former president of the European parliament, has told voters to reject Merkel’s “sleeping-pill politics” and vote against “another four years of stagnation and lethargy”. Reuters