BERLIN: Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Monday that she would talk to all mainstream parties about trying to form a “good, stable” government after Germany’s watershed election, and vowed to try to win back voters who supported an upstart nationalist force.

Sunday’s election saw the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party poach one million votes from Merkel’s conservatives, leaving her without an obvious coalition to lead Europe’s largest economy.

“We had hoped for a better result,” she admitted, referring to her CDU/CSU bloc’s score of 33 per cent, its worst outcome since 1949. Merkel, 63, said she would now seek exploratory talks on an alliance with two smaller parties, the pro-business Free Democrats and the ecologist Greens.

And she said she would extend an olive branch to the Social Democrats, her junior partners for eight of her 12 years in power, who suffered a crushing setback with just 20.5 per cent share of the vote and pledged to go into opposition.

The vote marked a breakthrough for the anti-Islam AfD, which with 12.6 per cent became the third-strongest party, and it vowed to “go after” Merkel over her migrant and refugee policy.

Merkel herself acknowledged that she had been a “polarising figure” to many people who ultimately gave their vote to the AfD, noting that voters in the AfD’s strongholds in depressed corners of the ex-communist east felt “left behind”.

She said she believed that not all were die-hard supporters of the AfD and that at least some could be won back “with good policies that solve problems”.

News weekly Der Spiegel said Merkel had no one but herself to blame for her election bruising. “Angela Merkel deserved this defeat,” the magazine’s Dirk Kurbjuweit wrote, accusing her of running an “uninspired” campaign and “largely ignoring the challenges posed by the right”.

‘Invasion of foreigners’

The entry of around 90 hard-right MPs to the glass-domed Bundestag chamber breaks a taboo in post-World War II Germany.

The AfD’s top candidate in the election, Alexander Gauland, told reporters on Monday that the party was the one true defender of a Germany for the Germans.

“I don’t want to lose Germany to an invasion of foreigners from foreign cultures,” he said. He refused to back away from recent comments urging Germans to be proud of their war veterans, and calling for a government official who is of Turkish origin to be “dumped in Anatolia”.

But just hours after its triumph, the party’s long-simmering infighting between radical and more moderate forces spilled out into the open at a dramatic news conference.

The AfD co-leader Frauke Petry stunned her colleagues by saying she would not join the party’s parliamentary group and would serve as an independent MP.

All other political parties have ruled out working with the AfD, whose leaders call Merkel a “traitor” for allowing in more than one million asylum seekers since 2015.

This will probably force Merkel to team up with two smaller, and very different, parties to form a line-up dubbed the “Jamaica coalition” because the three parties’ colours match those of the Caribbean country’s flag.

One is the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP), which with 10.7 per cent made a comeback after crashing out of parliament four years ago.

The other is the left-leaning Greens party, which won 8.9 per cent on campaign pledges to drive forward the country’s clean-energy transition.

But with marked differences on issues ranging from EU integration to immigration, months of horse-trading could lie ahead to build a new government and avert snap elections.

Published in Dawn, September 26th, 2017