Crunch time for Mutti Merkel
COALITION TALKS COLLAPSE: GERMAN LEADER MAY BE FORCED INTO SNAP ELECTIONS
Uncertain Germany now faces weeks or even months of political limbo.
Germany’s veteran Chancellor Angela Merkel has survived multiple crises and outlasted a string of world leaders but now faces a battle for her political life after the collapse of talks to forge a coalition government.
After 12 years at the helm of the EU’s biggest economy, the leader often called the world’s most powerful woman, may now have to contest snap elections at a time she is increasingly described as entering the twilight of her reign.
Merkel was left scrambling for ways to drag Germany out of crisis yesterday after high-stakes talks to form a new government collapsed, potentially forcing Europe’s top economy into snap elections.
With no other viable coalition in sight, Germany may be forced to hold new elections that risk being as inconclusive as September’s polls.
“Outside of Germany she is viewed with admiration as she enters the 13th year of her chancellorship, but at home the admiration has ebbed,” Spiegel Online commented days ago. With poll support for her conservative bloc about 30%, long-invincible Merkel faces sniping from within her own ranks over her refugee policy which sparked a far-right backlash that upended German politics.
Merkel won the September 24 elections, her fourth poll victory, but bled over a million votes to the far-right AfD, plunging her own party into weeks-long coalition talks that have now failed.
The famously cautious and cerebral leader now faces what she hates most – a time of heightened uncertainty with Germany poised for weeks or even months of political limbo.
Merkel may be down, but few are counting her out just yet, given the many crises she has mastered before.
During her long rule, the pastor’s daughter raised behind the Iron Curtain has been derided as Europe’s “austerity queen”, cheered as a saviour by refugees and hailed as the new “leader of the free world”.
In the turbulent times of Trump, Brexit and multiple global crises, the 63-year-old was long seen as the bedrock in a country concerned with maintaining its enviable growth and employment rates. –