Angela Merkel today began the tough challenge of forming Germany’s next government as a stunning election breakthrough for the far-Right sparked widespread protests.
Chancellor Merkel was re-elected for a fourth term but left weakened by the poll which reverberated across the country and beyond. Her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) won just 33 per cent of the vote — its worst result since the Second World War.
The big winners were the hard-Right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which became the first nationalist party to win seats in the Bundestag for half a century.
Hundreds of police were deployed around Berlin’s Alexanderplatz last night to protect the anti-immigrant AfD faithful celebrating the election of 94 representatives into the national parliament at the Traffic nightclub. Huge crowds gathered outside, shouting “Nazis out” and “all of Berlin hates the AfD”, as dozens of police officers sealed off the club’s entrance, making a handful of arrests over “small incidents”.
Other protests were held in Cologne and in the northern city of Hamburg, where demonstrators marched towards the party’s local headquarters.
Mrs Merkel is now likely to seek a previously untried three-way coalition with the pro-business Free Democrats and the traditionally Left-leaning Greens after the centre-Left Social Democrats also suffered losses.
The Social Democrats won just over 20 per cent of the vote and its leader Martin Schultz called for the immediate ending of the “grand coalition” with the CDU. The AfD surged to third, winning 12.6 per cent of the poll.
However the party suffered a blow today as one of its leaders, Frauke Petry, announced she would not take her parliamentary seat following a bitter leadership struggle.
The AfD’s co-leader Alexander Gauland today vowed to fight “an invasion of foreigners” into the country.
“One million people, foreigners, being brought into this country are taking away a piece of this country and we as AfD don’t want that,” he told a news conference.
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“We don’t want to lose Germany to an invasion of foreigners from a different culture. Very simple.” He recently said that Germans should be proud of their Second World War veterans. The AfD began life in 2013 as an anti-Europe protest party but then shifted focus to capitalise on misgivings over the record migrant influx in Germany. Its tone turned increasingly extreme in the last stretch of campaigning, with commentators calling its election result a “watershed moment” in German post-war politics.
Weeks of horse trading will now ensue as Mrs Merkel seeks to build a workable coalition. For all their victory celebrations the AfD will be isolated in parliament as all other parties have said they will not work with it.
