Angela
Merkel was basking in
a historic third-term election victory in Germany on Sunday night, having led her
conservatives to their best result in more than 20 years.
Merkel's Christian Democratic Union and its sister party won
41.5% of the vote, with analysts calling the win a personal victory for the
59-year-old, who is now on track to overtake Margaret Thatcher as Europe's
longest-serving female leader.
Merkel's performance was
compared to that of conservative chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who was the last
chancellor to secure a Bundestag majority without need of a coalition partner
since 1957. After a campaign that concentrated almost solely on Merkel's
personality and solid leadership in times of economic turmoil but was thin on
detailed policy, she came within a whisker of obtaining an absolute majority,
falling just five seats short.
Final results gave the CDU/CSU
311 seats, the Social Democrats 192, the Left party 64 and the Greens 63.
The historical dimensions of
the election were clear, with Merkel set to become just the third postwar
chancellor to secure three election wins, after Adenauer and Helmut Kohl, who
brought her into the party as an inexperienced and gauche 35-year-old.
She has also bucked the
European trend by becoming the only leader in the eurozone, whether from left
or right, to be re-elected since the snowballing of the euro crisis in 2010.
Out of 17 countries in the eurozone, 12 governments have fallen, indicating how
protected under Merkel's leadership Germans feel from the crisis.
In a result that was closely
watched across Europe, Merkel crushed her opponents – and, indeed, some of her
allies.
Her coalition partner, the FDP,
fell out of parliament for the first time since it was formed after the second
world war, securing just 4.8% of the vote. All other parties – with the notable
exception of the eurosceptic Alternative für Deutschland – lost ground.
The French president, François
Hollande, was the first world leader to offer his congratulations, but the
wider implications for Europe, austerity, the euro crisis and David Cameron's
hopes of repatriating powers from Brussels were less clear.
Merkel will still have to rely
on a coalition partner for a secure governing majority. Without her former
liberal allies, she might now have to turn to the SPD, which is firmly opposed
to Cameron's ideas of wresting powers back from the European Union.
The scientist and pastor's
daughter who grew up in communist East Germany appeared to her party faithful
in Berlin just 45 minutes after the first exit polls were released, a clear
indication of the confidence there was in the win.
"We can surely celebrate
this evening," she said, beaming at the largely young crowds who chanted
"Angie, Angie". "This is a super result," she told the
party faithful.
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