Germany held it's general election yesterday, and the results are more or less in.
CDU/CSU - 33%
SPD - 20.5%
AFD - 12.6%
FDP - 10.7%
Left - 9.2%
Greens - 8.9%
This is a win for Merkel and CDU, but also a stunning loss as well. For those not familiar with the party designations in Germany, the third place party is AFD: Alternative Fur Deutschland. They're a far right party running on an anti-immigration, anti-Islam and anti-Euro platform. It's the first time they've had any members of the Bundestag and it's pretty shocking for post war Germany. There's been protests outside AFD HQ, which have naturally been a bit violent.
More pertinently, the position AFD occupies has prompted a response already. The SPD (social democrats), formerly in coalition with the CDU, have decided to rule out the possibility of forming a new coalition with the CDU. This is partly because their leader failed to make his attacks on Merkel hit home largely because he was, as deputy in the coalition, involved in the decisions she was making. However, it's also a tactical move to make it impossible for AFD to form the official opposition, which would carry certain privileges nobody seems to want them to have. What I'm reading seems to suggest that the SPD wants to limit AFD influence by dominating the opposition parties, presumably because Die Linke would work alongside them to freeze out AFD.
Indeed, it seems that everything is being done to ostracise and limit AFD before its even taken any seats. No party will agree to work with them, which means unless they manage to somehow win an outright majority in seats (which is incredibly unlikely in a PR system) they won't ever be able to form any kind of government. Germany of today is very aware of the past, and I don't think this means much more in practice than it means for there to be far right parties in France, Holland or the UK. It's just unprecedented in modern Germany.
This places the CDU in the unenviable task of negotiating a coalition with the FDP (the Free Democrats, a liberal party focused on free markets) and the Greens. Given they're more or less opposites, with the CDU in between, it's probably going to be a challenge to keep such a government intact. It's predicted to take months to arrange such a ruling coalition.