Merkel’s left-right coalition has given the AfD exactly what it wanted

Angela Merkel will get her fourth term as Germany’s chancellor. Members of the Social Democratic Party, the SPD, voted to get into government with her again. Yet neither the SPD nor Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union are cheering the idea of four more years in power. Merkel may not be a ‘dead woman walking’, but she’s reaching the end of her remarkable career.

Barely a year ago, she was being talked about as the leader of the free world. Now she is blamed by her own party for upending German politics and, in the process, allowing the far-right to become a real political force for the first time since the 1940s. Germany will now get a majority government, but the country’s politics are in a state of crisis.

It’s a crisis that’s been intensifying for some time. It began when the federal elections last September delivered the worst result for Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union since 1949 — a result so abysmal she was lucky not to be ousted.