Angela Merkel set to soldier on

If German opinion polls are correct, there is little doubt about the outcome of Sunday’s election. But as Chancellor Angela Merkel anticipates the fourth term she said she would never seek, she must not forget the hard lessons of mass migration the nation learned after she threw the doors open to 1.5 million mainly Muslim “refugees” in 2015.

A year ago, Ms Merkel seemed a dead woman walking politically, her prospects doomed by a backlash over immigration. Polls that now show her Christian Democratic Union on 37 per cent and her nearest rivals, the Social Democrats, on 20 per cent reveal the extent to which Germans appear to have forgiven her for the influx.

But while Germans welcomed Ms Merkel’s deportation of 100,000 of the migrants who flooded into the country in 2015, 85 per cent of Germans continue to regard illegal migration as a serious problem. For that reason, the far-right anti-immigration party Alternative for Germany, which soared in the polls in 2015, is projected to win 10 per cent of the vote and gain 100 seats, a postwar first for Germany’s radical right. Cannily, Ms Merkel has focused attention on the undoubted economic success of her 12 years in office, with year-on-year growth approaching 3 per cent and unemployment at a record low of 4 per cent. The CDU’s election slogan, “For a Germany where life is good and we enjoy it”, plays on that record, which is the strongest in continental Europe. Workers and economists are concerned about the slump in wages growth, however, which is dampening consumer demand and posing a risk of deflation that could further undermine weaker EU economies.

While Ms Merkel is coasting to an expected victory, with 63 per cent Germans stating they believe she is doing a good job, she is again likely to need to seek coalition partners, as she has done with the Social Democrats in Germany’s present “grand coalition”. Her role, however, in hastening what British author Douglas Murray terms “Europe’s suicide” by exacerbating an immigration challenge that threatens the demographic and cultural future of Europe will never be erased.