Germany’s election gives us all pause

Angela Merkel now feels Theresa May’s pain. For so long portrayed as the ultimate master of the Prime Minister’s fate in Brexit negotiations, the German Chancellor today finds herself the leader of a conservative party patching things up after an election she was expected to win handsomely. She too has been taught a lesson by extremist opponents and is doomed to stitch together a majority with partners bound to extract an extortionate price.

The temptation to indulge in schadenfreude should be resisted, however. Germany’s election result is a profound moment for modern European politics. Its ramifications were already being felt yesterday, as cracks emerged in the long postwar union between Mrs Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU). That this alliance was only briefly dissolved once before, in the wake of election defeat in 1976, shows how damaging the result is for the German Chancellor.

Even if she is able to pacify the CSU, whose leadership in Munich profoundly disagreed with her over the admission of more than a million refugees, Mrs Merkel will still face months of exhausting negotiations to form a coalition with the Green Party and the pro-market FDP. Largely because of the FDP’S inclusion, the result is likely to be a government marginally more sympathetic to Britain’s Brexit position than the alternative – a CDU “Grand Coalition” with the SPD, Germany’s arch-europhile Leftists.

But Westminster should not get too optimistic. The EU has long been seen in Germany as a way of locking the Continent’s economic superpower into a westward-looking federation of nations, to the exclusion of the militaristic, nationalistic, Prussian sentiment in its east. With the stunning success of the Alternative for Germany (AFD) and its unashamed ethnic-nationalist message, many in the country will see a need for more Europe, not less.

But whatever the cure, the diagnosis is clear: a voice hitherto confined to the despised margins of the German political spectrum has erupted into the mainstream. If Mrs Merkel truly wants to address the cause of that discontent, as she has vowed she does, she will surely find that yet another spoon of distant, federalising, unaccountable bureaucracy in Brussels is not the best medicine. In fact it may make things very much worse. And that, in Germany, is a prospect to give us all pause.