A victory for stability, but with a warning sign.
Angela Merkel comfortably won election to a fourth term as chancellor of Germany on Sunday, but, as predicted, the far-right Alternative for Germany party gained enough share of the vote for a toehold in Parliament.
Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union won about 32.5 percent of the vote, leaving it in position to form a governing coalition. Its central rival, the center-left Social Democratic Party, received about 20 percent, its worst showing since World War II. Merkel’s party’s standing also dropped substantially since the last election in 2013, when it won 41.5 percent.
Merkel now faces the difficult task of forming an awkward alliance with two of the other parties that hit the 5 percent threshold needed to gain representation in parliament, likely the business-friendly Free Democrats and left-wing Greens. After governing with Merkel for four years, the Social Democrats have said they will not join her coalition this time around.
Merkel is Europe’s longest-serving head of state, and the third chancellor in modern Germany history to win four elections.
But the big story of the day, beyond her dominance, was Alternative for Germany, a nativist-friendly party that garnered 13.5 percent of the vote. It’s the first far-right party to reach the 5 percent threshold needed for representation in Parliament since the end of Nazi Germany. The country has been understandably resistant to populist political parties since the disastrous rule of Adolf Hitler. But Merkel’s decision to open up Germany to over a million Syrian refugees in 2015 left her vulnerable to a challenge from the right, and as in many other European countries and the United States, the issue of immigration became more hot-button than ever. Alternative for Germany, which was founded only in 2013, attempted to bring into the mainstream anti-immigrant rhetoric that had previously been taboo in the country.
“We will go after them. We will claim back our country,” Alexander Gauland, one of the party’s leaders, said after the election.
After the United Kingdom voted for Brexit and the U. S. elected President Trump in 2016, Merkel’s standing had seemed particularly shaky. But over the last several months, she stabilized her position throughout what became a surprisingly sleepy election – Russian hackers appeared to mostly sit it out – to the point that Sunday’s outcome was largely a foregone conclusion.
