Merkel elected to fourth term

BERLIN: German Chancellor Angela Merkel, bruised by half a year of post-election coalition haggling, was on Wednesday narrowly confirmed by parliament to her fourth and likely final term at the helm of Europe’s biggest economy.

Lawmakers in Berlin’s glass-domed Reichstag voted 364-315 with nine abstentions for Merkel, who was then formally appointed by President Frank-Walter Steinmeier before taking the oath of office. The secret ballot suggested 35 MPs of her new right-left coalition bloc voted against Merkel, giving her a thin nine-vote margin above a simple majority that opposition parties were quick to label a "rocky start" for a spent and joyless governing alliance.

"There were more dissenting voices than I expected," said Andrea Nahles, the designated head of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), which long struggled with whether to once more govern in Merkel’s shadow.

Merkel, wearing a necklace in the national colours black-red-gold, nevertheless beamed as applause filled the Bundestag chamber, where her scientist husband Joachim Sauer and her 89-year-old mother Herlind Kasner were among the well-wishers.

For the veteran leader, the ceremony marked the end of a painful stretch of post-election paralysis, the deepest crisis of her 12-year career. A right-wing populist rise in September elections weakened all mainstream parties and deprived Merkel of a majority, forcing her into another unhappy alliance with the centre-left SPD.

The grand coalition, mockingly dubbed a "GroKo" in German, didn’t start as a "love marriage", her designated vice chancellor and finance minister, the SPD’s Olaf Scholz, drily observed this week.

All coalition partners have nonetheless vowed to stay together for a full term until 2021. Merkel later met her new cabinet, in which the SPD has wrested the trophy posts of both finance and foreign affairs to the dismay of critics within her Christian Democratic Union (CDU).

To quieten the dissent, Merkel has named an outspoken critic, Jens Spahn, 37, as her new health minister and tapped a potential successor with new CDU general secretary Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer.

"The chancellor was, from time to time, written off in the past six months," said analyst Marianne Kneuer of Hildesheim University, adding that with the fresh appointments "Merkel has strengthened her position again".

On Friday Merkel will head to Paris to discuss EU reform plans with French President Emmanuel Macron ahead of a March 22-23 summit, after a lengthy stretch in which Berlin was hamstrung on the European and world stage.

Macron warned in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung daily that, without Germany on board, "part of my project would be doomed to failure". Merkel’s incoming coalition has broadly welcomed Macron’s bold reform plans, meant to reinvigorate the bloc and counter populists who have made major gains in Western democracies.