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Merkel wins 3rd term but forced to form tricky alliance
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Chancellor Angela Merkel clinched a third term in German elections yesterday but will be forced to form an awkward coalition with her chief rivals to govern Europe’s top economy, exit polls indicated.
Voters rewarded Merkel, often called the world’s most powerful woman, with another four years at the helm for steering them unscathed through the eurozone debt turmoil that engulfed its southern flank.
But in one of the tightest races in German history, they punished her pro-business partner, the Free Democrats, kicking them out of parliament for the first time since 1949, according to the exit polls on public television.
The upstart anti-euro party AfD appeared to fall just short of the 5-percent hurdle to representation amid anger over German contributions to bailout packages for stricken eurozone partners.
Under Germany’s complex electoral maths, the result means the most likely scenario will be a left-right “grand coalition” between Merkel’s Christian Democrats and their traditional opponents, the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), which scored around 26 percent.
Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats scored about 42 percent, marking a personal triumph for the 59-year-old chancellor.
She led a fractious “grand coalition” during her first term in 2005-2009, with the SPD’s chancellor candidate this time around, Peer Steinbrueck, as her finance minister.
Analysts say the coalition talks could drag on for weeks, with the SPD insisting on a national minimum wage and possibly naming the finance minister as the price for getting back in government with Merkel.
A physicist by training Merkel is only the third person to win a third term in Germany after the immediate post-war leader, Konrad Adenauer, and Helmut Kohl, the father of German re-unification.
If she serves at least until 2017, she will become Europe’s longest serving female leader besting Margaret Thatcher who was Britain’s prime minister for 11 years.
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