A chastened chancellor Angela Merkel made a rare admission of failure on Monday, offering an apology to Germans unsettled by her migration strategy, which brought more than one million people into the country last year.
Her admission followed historic losses for her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in Sunday’s state elections in Berlin, dominated by the migration crisis. Adding to her woes, on Monday morning, for the first time, her own Social Democrat (SPD) coalition allies flagged a three-way centre-left coalition with Germany’s Greens and Linke (Left) Party as a viable option to oust Dr Merkel from power in next year’s federal elections.
Responding to the election result in Berlin, the German leader admitted her now notorious welcome to migrants a year ago had caught the country unprepared and resulted in chaos and uncertainty.
“If I could, I would turn back time many, many years to better prepare myself, the federal government and all those in positions of responsibility for the situation we were rather unprepared for in the late summer of 2015,” said Dr Merkel. “No one – including myself – wants a repeat of that situation.”
Watching the Berlin CDU finish almost six points down on 17.6 per cent was “bitter”, she admitted. Over at Berlin’s ruling SPD, which lost almost seven points in its own historic election disaster, to finish on 21.6 per cent, the mood was brighter because it has options to remain in power.
The most likely: a three-way coalition between the SPD, Greens and the Linke (Left) party – a political premiere in Germany. The Berlin SPD has worked before in the capital’s city-state government with the Linke, heirs to the East German communists, but has always refused to entertain such an alliance at federal level. But Sunday may have changed that.
“Such a thing is possible, but there would have to be sufficient consensus on policy, which I don’t see at the moment with the Left Party,” said Thomas Oppermann, SPD floor leader in the Bundestag, on national radio. In a tantalising aside, he added: “But why should that not change by the Bundestag election?” – due next September.
The flirtation was mutual on Monday, with Left Party co-leader Bernd Riexinger saying that “if the conditions are right, we stand ready for a political shift”.
He reiterated that his party wanted a partial roll-back of decades-old welfare reforms and an end to “foreign combat deployments of German military” – leaving the door open to Bundeswehr peacekeeping missions.
