German Chancellor Angela Merkel is assured of a fourth term in office after her Christian Democratic Union won a projected 32 percent of the votes cast in Sunday’s parliamentary elections, but will have to contend with the far-right entering the Bundestag after it took some 13 percent of votes.
Late on Sunday night, as news broke that the AfD had cleared the five-percent threshold to claim seats in the Bundestag and would become the third biggest party represented there, roughly a thousand people staged a noisy protest in Berlin outside the building where party officials marked the result.
As rain came down, the crowd shouted “Nazis get out” and “All of Berlin hates the AfD”. Police placed themselves between the building in Alexanderstrasse and the protesters and kept watch over the area into the early hours of the morning.
Merkel last week emphatically ruled out any cooperation with the party that has made big gains on the back of opposition to her decision two years ago to open Germany’s border to Syrian refugees. She is now expected to take some three months to form a coalition government and though Sunday’s elections will see six parties take seats in the Bundestag, her options have diminished.
It is expected that she will look towards the Green and the Free Democrats, which improved its vote share to 11 percent.
Merkel’s main rival for the chancellery, Martin Shulz, announced immediately after the release of the exit polls that he his party would not enter into another coalition agreement Merkel for the next four years but would instead return to the opposition benches. He would want to stay on as leader of the SPD, he said, and rebuild the party.
The SPD has failed to earn credit for reforms it helped drive through while part of the governing coalition with the CDU since 2013.
It is expected that Merkel’s next move will be to reach out to the Greens and FDP to negotiate a three-way coalition, dubbed the Jamaica options because of the black, green and yellow of the parties involved. It is potential partnership that has been mooted since Merkel won her first term in 2005 but has never come to pass and the policies of her conservatives, the pro-business FPD and the Greens remain far apart.
Exit polls gave the Free Democrats at 10.5 percent, the Greens with 9.5, and the Left Party on nine percent.
Greens leader Katrin Goering-Eckardt told a post-election party gathering in Berlin’s Neukoelln that the party’s improved score was good news, but the AfD’s gains were disturbing.
“We are going to sit in the Bundestag with Nazis and racists,” Goering-Eckardt told supporters shortly after the exit poll data was released.
A Berlin resident taking part in the protest at Alexanderplatz said he believed the far-right was dangerous and he had a moral duty to oppose the AfD because his family had supported the Nazis.
“My family were Nazis; I had to work all of my life to overcome that, so that is why I am here to oppose them,” said Alexander von Preyss, a 54-year-old IT consultant.
“This is dangerous. I hope they soon disappear again, but I’m not so sure,” he said.
The official provisional election result was expected to be known only on Monday. Counting was likely to take longer than usual because election staff also had to count ballots in a referendum held simultaneously in Berlin to ask residents whether they wanted to preserve Tegel airport in the east of the city.
– African News Agency (ANA)
