Mutti is kaputti

Beleaguered Merkel says she’s stepping down as Germany’s chancellor in 2021

ANGELA Merkel’s 13-year reign will end in 2021, she revealed yesterday.

The German Chancellor said she will not seek re-election at the next general election.

It comes following a disastrous regional election in the western state of Hesse which triggered a political earthquake in Berlin, once again pushing Mrs Merkel’s fragile left-right coalition government to the brink.

Some questioned whether she will last until 2021, with coalition partners the centre-left Social Democrats suggesting they could pull the plug on propping her up. Mrs Merkel, chancellor since 2005, announced that she is also to step down as chairwoman of her Christian Democratic Union party in December, creating the unusual situation of leading the country but not her party.

Referring to frequent rows in her coalition Mrs Merkel yesterday made it clear that ‘we can’t just return to business as usual’. She said: ‘I bear responsibility for everything – for our successes, as well as our failures.’ Standing down as party leader would allow the government to ‘concentrate its energies on good governance’, adding it was ‘time to start a new chapter’.

The German chancellor’s power has been on the wane since her fateful 2015 decision to throw Germany’s borders open, letting in more than one million people during the migrant crisis.

Outspoken German MEP HansOlaf Henkel said Mrs Merkel, also known as ‘Mutti’, or mother, in her country, would go down as the leader who largely fuelled Brexit. He said: ‘She refused to give David Cameron some flexibility over the controls of immigration into the UK and contributed to the British Brexiteers’ success through the perceived chaos of her refugee policy.’

Tory MP Andrew Bridgen joked that ‘Mutti is kaputti’, adding her departure ‘probably allows the European Commission more scope to inflict punishment on the UK’.