Merkel looks to make history with fourth win

GERMAN Chancellor Angela Merkel is seeking to make history on Sunday with a fourth straight election victory. Should she pull off the win that polls forecast, it will cement her status as the most important political leader in Europe with potentially key implications, including for Brexit negotiations, plus the EU integration project into the 2020s.

Part of the reason surveys suggest Mrs Merkel will win relatively comfortably is that the campaign, at least to date, has lacked any significant domestic or foreign policy controversy, even over migration or terrorism, to put her on the defensive. This is unlike some German campaigns of the past such as 2002 when incumbent Gerhard Schroder's opposition to the then forthcoming US-led Iraq War helped power him to a very narrow re-election success.

Instead, Germans are generally contented right now, seeing themselves as beneficiaries of globalisation with unemployment this year the lowest since the reunification of East and West Germany after the Cold War. This is underlined in Mrs Merkel's buoyant approval ratings of around 60 per cent, a major achievement given that she has been leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) since 2000 and Chancellor for a dozen years. If she serves a full fourth term, she would match Helmut Kohl's 16 years of office from 1982 to 1998 and surpass Konrad Adenauer's service from 1949 to 1963 as Germany's first post-war chancellor. In fact, a full fourth term would see Mrs Merkel only sitting behind Otto von Bismarck who served for almost two decades from 1871-90 during a period in which he was a dominant force in European affairs, having helped previously drive unification of Germany.