Mutter Needs More Courage

Angela Merkel’s smaller victory means sterner challenges. Then there’s the AfD threat.

- Pranay Sharma

To a large number of Germans, Angela Merkel has been a symbol of stability, competence and success. A pastor’s daughter who grew up in Communist East Germany to earn a doctorate in quantum chemistry and then went on to become the most powerful woman—and, for some time now, Europe’s most powerful politician—in the European Union as Germany’s first woman Cha­ncellor, she has been a hugely inspirational figure.

That image of invincibility—built over three terms in power—now seems to have taken a beating after the recently-­concluded federal elections in Ger-many on September 24. Her ruling party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), along with its coalition partner and Bavarian sister, the Christian Social Union (CSU), got 33 per cent of the votes, making it the largest party in parliament. Yet this has also been its worst performance since 1949 in the Bundestag.

The most worrisome challenge for most people within and outside Germany came from the voices of narrow unr­eason. For the first time in 72 years, a far-right party, Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD), which is avowedly anti-Muslim and anti-immigration, has gained as much as 13 per cent of the votes, making it the third largest group in the Bundestag. For many, the air is redolent of the rise of National Socialist German Workers’ Party (the Nazi Party) in the 1930s.

“The outcome of Germany’s federal ele­ction holds a crucial lesson for the European Union: even a country that has been the EU’s bedrock of stability amid crisis is not immune to political fragmentation and polarisation,” opi­nes Daniela Schwarzer, director, German Council on Foreign Relations.