GERMAN Chancellor Angela Merkel has won a historic fourth term, but the country’s politics has been reordered in a way that could have profound consequences for a liberal democratic world order. While Germany’s multiparty system renders impossible an easy understanding of the country’s politics, the worst performance since 1949 of Ms Merkel’s CDU and its sister Bavarian party, the CSU, appears to have opened the door of the German parliament to the far right for the first time since the 1950s. The rise of the xenophobic Alternative for Germany party, which campaigned ferociously against Ms Merkel’s pro-immigration policies — forcing the German chancellor to reassess her stance on immigration despite presiding over an economy that is one of Europe’s strongest — is the real story of the German election. Where Emmanuel Macron’s twin decisive victories in France earlier this year, the presidential election in May and the legislative elections in June, had seemed to suggest that the rise of populism, nationalism and anti-immigration in Western democracies may have stalled, the German election has reasserted its importance. Certainly, the vast majority of Germans have clearly repudiated the AfD and the politics of hate it stands for and the five other major parties in the new German parliament will likely work to limit its influence, but the threats to a liberal democratic world order are serious and unlikely to disappear anytime soon.

Worrying too is the rise of authoritarian figures in many parts of the world. US President Donald Trump, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Turkish President Recep Erdogan, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, Russian President Vladmir Putin and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban are a diverse group with very different agendas and politics — but all appear to believe in strong states that are bristling with military power directed at perceived external enemies. At the start of her first term as chancellor nearly 12 years ago, Ms Merkel may not have imagined she would win four consecutive terms and certainly could not have expected to become the de facto leader of progressive Western thought in a changing world order. The financial crisis of 2008 and a wave of refugees from a dangerously unstable Middle East appear to have triggered latent impulses in the politics of many countries. With her progressive agenda, Ms Merkel must resist that tide and help re-establish the world’s belief in more inclusive, people-oriented systems of governance. It will not be easy, but Ms Merkel’s resolve and personal standing may help.

Published in Dawn, September 27th, 2017