German elections 2017: Every victory is not worth celebrating

‘Every victory is not worth celebrating’. The phrase seems true with the facial expression while making her way to Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) headquarter.

The grand coalition of center-right CDU/CSU lead by Morkel herself won 33 percent and registered as leading party in the federal result. Whereas the second position occupied by the Social Democrat SPD. However In an interesting development, the far right and anti-immigrant party, Alternative for Germany AfD becomes the first in last six decade to enter into Bundestag.

The CDU/CSU coalition manages 246 seats with 33 percent of the vote share while the major opposition SPD bagged 20 percent and won 153 seats. The vote percentage of both the major party CDU/CSU coalition and SPD fell by 8 and 6 percent. The AfD historically takes away 13.5 percentage of the vote and won 94 seats.

The federal election result left Angela Morkel in a chaotic situation. The SPD leader, Martin Schulz said the result was a “bitter disappointment” and party would not continue in coalition with Merkel rather sit in opposition.

Angela Morkel acknowledges the party’s worst performance since 1949 and promises to understand the concern of AfD voters. Addressing to her supports she said, “There’s a big new challenge for us, and that is the entry of the AfD in the Bundestag,” she said. “We want to win back AfD voters.”

The local leader of AfD in Berlin, Georg Pazderski, declared the success a “political earthquake.” He further said, “For the first time, we have a conservative party right beside our Christian Democrats and this is because they moved more and more to the left and we moved into the vacuum.” However, the AfD promised “constructive opposition” in parliament but the Greens have already complained that “Nazis have returned to parliament”.

“This election will go down in the history books for two reasons. Angela Merkel may have won a fourth term but it is her worst ever general election result. And right-wing nationalists are now part of the German establishment,” Jenny Hill summed up the post result analysis in his article to BBC.

To form a government within Bundestag, Angela Merkel has to involve other parties to a combined total of at least 50% of the seats in parliament. There are likely to be several coalition options and plenty of disagreement between the parties before they reach to a deal.