Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel won a fourth term in office on Sunday, with her CDU (Christian Democratic Union) / CSU (CDU’s sister party in Bavaria) garnering at least 32 percent of the vote, according to most exit polls.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tweeted his congratulations late in the evening, when the results were made official.
Congratulations to Angela , a true friend of Israel, on her re-election as Chancellor of Germany.
— Benjamin Netanyahu (@netanyahu) September 24, 2017
“We have had 12 years of governmental responsibility and it was not a foregone conclusion that we would be the largest party again,” she told supporters in her victory speech. “But this was also an election that saw the arrival in parliament of the AfD.
The extremist far-right Alternative for Germany party will seat the first known neo-Nazis in the German parliament since World War II, lamented the co-leaders of the Greens party. Greens co-leader Katrin Göring-Eckardt pledged to a cheering crowd at the party headquarters post-election gathering, however, “We will not let one single attack on German democracy stand.”
Meanwhile, Merkel promised her own supporters in a victory speech: “We will conduct a very thorough analysis; we want to regain those voters who voted for the AfD, to discover their concerns and worries … We want to win back the AfD voters above all through good politics.
“We need to work now for a just and a free country. That means we need to bring together all of the EU countries to fight against the causes of migration and to fight illegal immigration. It is clear that the topic of security is as much a worry for people as the topic of prosperity.
“However, we have a mandate to assume responsibility, and we will now assume it now, calmly with our partners.”
Social Democrats (SPD) took second place with 20 percent, with AfD in third place with 13 percent, as stated above, the first far-right party to enter the Bundestag in 60 years. The party promised “constructive opposition” as it kept watch on the numbers, while the Greens lamented that there were “again Nazis in parliament.”