Angela Merkel wins 4th term as chancellor of Germany

[mfcorey1]

Angela Merkel just walked into her fourth term as chancellor of Germany. Her party, the Christian Democrats (CDU), picked up 32.5 percent of the votes in Sunday’s election, according to the first exit polls issued at 6 pm German local time. The Social Democrats, Merkel’s closest challenger, were a distant 20 percent. Those numbers were lower than the last polls from Stern/RTL, which projected 36 percent would pull the lever for the CDU and 22 percent for the SPD.


The results weren’t a surprise. Merkel’s campaign taglines were all about continuity. “Clear for Stability,” read the podium under the chancellor at a rally in Munich on September 22. Her campaign was designed to remind Germans that life in Deutschland is pretty good, with Europe’s strongest economy, only 3.7 percent unemployment, and the fastest-growing GDP among the G7 industrialized nations. After a year of jolting elections, from the United States selecting Donald Trump to Brexit in the United Kingdom, the subtext was clear: Germans should stay the course.

But one party was set on crashing Merkel’s stability party — and did. The Alternative For Germany (AfD), a far-right party founded in 2013, won 13.5 percent of the vote, according to these exit polls. That meant the AfD not only easily cleared the barrier to entry to the Bundestag (set at 5 percent of the general vote) and will now be the first far-right party to enter the German parliament in decades, but it does so as the third-largest party.

https://www.vox.com/world/2017/9/24/16356006/angela-merkel-german-elections-afd-far-right