Angela Merkel will serve as Germany’s chancellor for a fourth term, but Sunday’s win comes at a high price. The right-wing populists are now the third-strongest party in parliament and her negotiations to create a new government are likely to be complicated.
Also Read: Angela’s ashes: 5 takeaways from the German election
Angela Merkel, The Most Powerful Woman in a World of Unstable Men
Last year’s Brexit vote followed by the election of Donald Trump resulted in the idea that populism was sweeping the West. Elections were scheduled in 2017 for Austria, the Netherlands, France, and Germany, leading to fears among the establishment in those countries that the center-left-center-right consensus that had dominated politics for much of the past half century was in peril. The results so far have brought relief to the establishment in those countries.
Donald Trump is a symptom of the larger crisis that has been brewing for NATO ever since the Cold War ended. Alliances are first and foremost a collective response to threats, and NATO’s primary rationale disappeared when the Soviet Union collapsed. Attempts to give NATO important new missions “out of area” did not go well, whether one looks at Libya or Kosovo or Afghanistan, and some of America’s other initiatives — most notably the invasion of Iraq — did considerable damage to transatlantic solidarity as well.
Emmanuel Macron’s election to the French presidency provides the European Union with an opportunity to move past the internal conflicts that have hastened its disintegration. Rather than standing exclusively with the old elites or the new populists, Macron has promised to rally broad political support under the banner of European reform.
Photo: Bundesregierung/Steins
Donald Trump entered office hoping that he could splinter the European Union. But what if his presidency has the effect of further unifying it—against America? German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s announcement that Europe can no longer rely on America as a partner and “must take our destiny into our own hands” marks a turning point.
Across the continent, Muslims are breaking into politics, becoming parliamentarians, assembly members, senators and mayors to represent their increasingly diverse electorates. Mayor of London Sadiq Khan made headlines around the world when he was elected in 2016, and, according to a recent poll, he is the most popular Labour Party politician in the U.K. But he’s not alone: Ahmed Aboutaleb has been the Muslim mayor of Rotterdam since 2009 and is considered one of the Netherlands’ most popular politicians.
Months of post-mortems of Clinton’s loss to Trump overshadow one of the simplest explanations: It’s important to convince voters that you are not corrupt. Macron also benefited from voters who refused to give Le Pen a free pass on her party’s history of racism and xenophobia the way Americans let Trump get away with his inflammatory statements.
After years of careful preparation and months of campaigning, Emmanuel Macron and his allies are about to take control of the euro area’s second-biggest economy. Typically associates from the elite French schools where the new president studied, or his time in government under outgoing President Francois Hollande, Team Macron were first dismissed as fantasists and then faced attacks from all sides. Now they are going to be taking decisions that will affect hundreds of billions of dollars in global trade from energy to finance and defense.
The last time a French Presidential election was anywhere near this wild was in 2002. Jacques Chirac, the center-right President, was supposed to face Lionel Jospin, the center-left Prime Minister. (The two men had been sharing power in a “cohabitation” government.) The extreme-right candidate, Jean-Marie Le Pen—Marine’s father, an eyepatch-wearing former paratrooper and gleeful racist, who famously called the Holocaust a “detail” of history—had been polling a weak fourth.
