Chancellor Angela Merkel said yesterday that she would talk with all mainstream parties about trying to form a “good, stable” government after Germany’s watershed election, and vowed to try to win back voters who supported an upstart nationalist force.
Sunday’s election saw the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party poach 1mn votes from Merkel’s conservatives, leaving her without an obvious coalition to lead Europe’s largest economy.
“We had hoped for a better result,” she admitted, referring to her CDU/CSU bloc’s score of 33%, its worst outcome since 1949.
Merkel, 63, said she would now seek exploratory talks on an alliance with two smaller parties, the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP) and the ecologist Greens.
And she said she would extend an olive branch to the Social Democrats (SPD), her junior partners for eight of her 12 years in power, who suffered a crushing setback with just 20.5% share of the vote and pledged to go into opposition.
The vote marked a breakthrough for the anti-Islam AfD, (Alternative for Germany) which with 12.6% became the third-strongest party, and it vowed to “go after” Merkel over her migrant and refugee policy.
Merkel herself acknowledged that she had been a “polarising figure” to many people who ultimately gave their vote to the AfD, noting that voters in the AfD’s strongholds in depressed corners of the ex-communist east felt “left behind”.
She said she believed that not all were diehard supporters of the AfD and that at least some could be won back “with good policies that solve problems”.
News weekly Der Spiegel said that Merkel had no one but herself to blame for her election bruising.
“Angela Merkel deserved this defeat,” the magazine’s Dirk Kurbjuweit wrote, accusing her of running an “uninspired” campaign and “largely ignoring the challenges posed by the right”.
The entry of around 90 hard-right MPs to the glass-domed Bundestag chamber breaks a taboo in post-World War II Germany.
While joyful supporters of the AfD – a party with links to the far-right French National Front and Britain’s UKIP – sang the German national anthem at a Berlin club as the results came in late on Sunday, hundreds of protesters outside shouted “Nazis out!”
The AfD’s top candidate in the election, Alexander Gauland, told reporters yesterday that the party was the one true defender of a Germany for the Germans.
“I don’t want to lose Germany to an invasion of foreigners from foreign cultures,” he said.
He refused to back away from recent comments urging Germans to be proud of their war veterans, and calling for a government official who is of Turkish origin to be “dumped in Anatolia”.
But just hours after its triumph, the party’s long-simmering infighting between radical and more moderate forces spilled out into the open at a dramatic news conference (see accompanying report).
Political scientist Suzanne Schuettemeyer of Halle University in eastern Germany said the AfD’s presence in parliament would harm the country’s image abroad.
“It’s Germany and it will change the way we are perceived, because AfD will speak a language that we thought ... was outside of our political consensus,” she told AFP.
All other political parties have ruled out working with the AfD, whose leaders call Merkel a “traitor” for allowing in more than 1mn asylum-seekers since 2015.
Merkel said that while she was not seeking a repeat of the influx, she stood by her decision made on “humanitarian” grounds.
But the leader of her Bavarian CSU allies, Horst Seehofer, a vocal critic of Merkel’s asylum policy, called the vote outcome a “bitter disappointment” and pledged to close the “open flank” on the right before state elections next year.
SPD leader Martin Schulz, putting a brave face on his defeat, said the 150-year-old party, traditionally the voice of the working classes, would be “a strong opposition force in this country, to defend democracy in this country against those who question it and attack it”.
This will probably force Merkel to team up with two smaller, and very different, parties to form a lineup dubbed the “Jamaica coalition” because the three parties’ colours match those of the Caribbean country’s flag.
One is the liberal FDP, which with 10.7% made a comeback after crashing out of parliament four years ago.
The other is the left-leaning Greens party, which won 8.9% on campaign pledges to drive forward the country’s clean-energy transition.
But with marked differences on issues ranging from EU integration to immigration, months of horse-trading could lie ahead to build a new government and avert snap elections.
European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker urged Merkel to form a stable government as soon as possible.
“Europe needs a strong German government now more than ever, one able to actively shape the future of our continent,” he said.
AfD leadership splits hours after electoral success
The leadership of Germany’s far-right has cracked within hours of its electoral success, when the highest-profile figure in its more moderate wing stormed out of its victory news conference and abandoned its parliamentary group.
Frauke Petry, a 42-year-old chemist, was the most recognisable face in the Alternative for Germany (AfD) during its swift rise over the past two years.
But she said she could not stand with an “anarchistic party” that lacked a credible plan to govern, and would sit in parliament as an independent.
The anti-immigrant AfD shocked the establishment by winning 12.6% of the vote in Sunday’s election after a campaign that channelled public anger at Chancellor Angela Merkel’s 2015 decision to leave Germany’s border open to migrants.
The result made the AfD the first far-right group to win seats in the Bundestag since the 1950s.
A vocal critic of immigration, Petry served as co-leader of the AfD, but had come into conflict with other senior figures in the party in recent months, saying that she understood why some voters were alarmed at some of their radical rhetoric.
She has been less visible as a figure since a surprise decision in April not to run the party’s election campaign.
“I’ve decided I won’t be part of the AfD’s group in the German parliament but will initially be an individual member of parliament in the lower house,” Petry said as she left the party’s news conference.
She has said the AfD should be ready to join coalition governments, while other figures said the party should stick to opposition.
All established parties refuse to work with the AfD.
Senior party figures played down her importance.
“It’s always a shame when someone very talented leaves the party and Frauke Petry is very talented. But I must note that she wasn’t much help recently in the campaign,” one of the AfD’s top candidates, Alexander Gauland, told Reuters.
Once seen as a radical for transforming the AfD from a group opposed to eurozone financial bailouts into the leading anti-immigration party, Petry distanced herself from top AfD candidates before the election.
She declined to answer further questions, including whether she would remain the AfD’s co-leader, but said the public would hear from her in the coming days.
Merkel: We had hoped for a better result.
