Angela Merkel is headed toward a fourth term as German Chancellor and a far-right party will enter parliament for the first time in more than 60 years, according to normally reliable exit polls released just after the voting ended in Germany.
The far-right party, Alternative for Germany, got some 13.5 per cent of the vote, a significant showing of voter anger over immigration and inequality as support for the two main parties sagged.
Despite her victory, Merkel and her conservatives cannot rule alone, making it probable that the chancellor’s political life will be substantially more complicated. The shape and policies of a new governing coalition will involve weeks of painstaking negotiations.
The center-left Social Democrats, Ms. Merkel’s coalition partners for the last four years, ran a poor second to her center-right grouping, and its leaders announced Sunday evening that the party would go into opposition, hoping to rebuild their political profile.
But the step was a way for Germany’s mainstream political parties to make sure that the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, stays on the political sidelines and does not become as the country’s official Opposition.
The Alternative for Germany nonetheless vowed to shake the consensus politics of Germany. Alexander Gauland, one of AfD’s leaders, told party supporters after the results that in parliament: “We will go after them. We will claim back our country.”
To cheers, he said: “We did it. We are in the German parliament and we will change Germany.”
While both Ms. Merkel and the Social Democrats lost significant voter support from 2013, her victory vaults her into the ranks of Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Kohl, the only post-war chancellors to win four national elections.