Merkel’s tarnished victory

Shock results in Germany’s federal elections this week saw Angela Merkel win a fourth term as chancellor, but also unprecedented gains for her opponents on the far Right. Merkel’s Christian Democrat-led alliance took 33% of the vote – its worst performance since 1949 – while the anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland (AFD) secured 13% to become the country’s third largest party. It will now form the first far-right grouping in the Bundestag for more than 50 years. Support for Merkel’s former coalition partner, the Social Democrats (SPD), slumped to a postwar low of 21%.

Signs of division within the AFD emerged immediately after the poll when one of its co-leaders, Frauke Petry, abruptly resigned from the party, describing it as “anarchic”. Petry, who says she will sit in the Bundestag as an independent, is known to have opposed the Afd’s recent move to the Right.

What the editorials said

For Angela Merkel, the election result represents a richly deserved rebuke, said the Daily Mail. Like others in Europe’s “we know best” political class, she chose to ignore public unease over mass immigration, throwing open the nation’s doors to more than a million refugees in 2015. The result? Victory for the “xenophobic” AFD in 94 seats. Founded just four years ago, the party must now be seen as a “key opposition force”, said The Guardian, and that’s an “appalling prospect”. By winning a place in the Bundestag, it is entitled to state funding and is guaranteed more TV exposure. “Anyone attached to liberal democracy” should be concerned by Afd’s rise.

Let’s keep a sense of proportion, said The Wall Street Journal. Many Germans were simply disillusioned with 12 years of Merkel’s “bland-as-she-goes” government, often in a coalition with a socialist party that failed to offer any kind of competing vision. With the polls suggesting a clear victory for Merkel, they knew they could vote AFD with no danger of handing the party real power. “This was a very German protest vote: safe.”