Chastened Merkel braces for coalition tussle after vote

German Chancellor Angela Merkel huddled with her party Sept. 25 after winning a fourth term with a far weaker score, now facing the double headache of an emboldened nationalist opposition party and thorny coalition talks ahead.

If the campaign was widely decried as boring, its outcome was a bombshell -- a populist hard-right surge poached votes from Merkel's conservatives as well as the center-left Social Democrats, handing both their worst results in decades.

"A nightmare victory for Merkel," said Germany's top-selling daily Bild. "The governing parties and the chancellor squandered the people's faith in them."

After 12 years in power and running on a promise of stability and economic strength, Merkel's CDU/CSU bloc scored 33 percent, according to final results, against 20.5 percent for the Social Democrats under challenger Martin Schulz, who pledged to go into the opposition.

The election marked a breakthrough for the anti-Islam Alternative for Germany (AfD), which with 12.6 percent became the third strongest party and vowed to "go after" Merkel over her migrant and refugee policy.

News weekly Der Spiegel said Merkel had no one but herself to blame for the bruising she got from voters.
"Angela Merkel deserved this defeat," the magazine's Dirk Kurbjuweit wrote, accusing her of running an "uninspired" campaign and "largely ignoring the challenges posed by the right."

The entry of around 90 hard-right nationalist MPs to the glass-domed Bundestag chamber breaks a taboo in post-World War II Germany.

"We will take our country back," vowed the AfD's jubilant Alexander Gauland, who has recently urged Germans to be proud of their war veterans and said a government official who is of Turkish origin should be ...