It is no mean feat for Angela Merkel to make her fourth electoral victory in Germany’s election.

The scientist from East Germany, a former member of the Communist Party, now stands to have been in power in her country for more than Helmut Kohl who is rightly considered as the colossus who engineered the annexation of Eastern Germany after the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

With her homely appearance, wearing the same sort of clothes, her down to earth wit and her spartan lifestyle, she is beloved and admired by Germans who may not vote for her.

In politics she has always chosen the middle way and up till Sunday this looked like the winning approach. She seemed to have induced the entire country to a peaceful slumber such were her reactions to all that her competitors threw at her. She neutralized them all with commonsense and a softly-softly approach.

Then the results came in.

Her CDU remained the biggest party in the country. Her former ally in the coalition, the SPD slumped, as had been widely predicted. The two coalition parties slumped to their worst collective showing since 1949. It was the end of an era.

And the rightwing Alternative for Germany (AfD) became the third largest party in the country and for the first time since World War II the far right entered Parliament.

AfD is completely a child of our times. It began as a reaction to Germany’s help for ailing Greece. When the Greek situation was defused, and with some in-fighting as well, the party lost appeal. Then Merkel let in more than one million refugees, mostly from Syria, and AfD found a new lease of life in opposing this ‘invasion’.

In the first hours after the election results, even the oldest alliance in Germany almost became unraveled. The CSU (the Bavarian party) toyed with scrapping the joint parliamentary group with the CDU. Then it relented.

The CSU lost more than 11 percentage points in its own state; the CDU as a whole lost 7 percentage points. Besides, the CSU faces a regional election next year. It registered 38.5 per cent in its state while CDU got 26.8 per cent in the entire country.

The election results suggest that the CDU block (that is, CDU plus CSU) plus the Greens and FDP (the Liberals) would have a comfortable majority in Parliament but the talks to establish the governing coalition will be long and fraught with difficulties. There are some regional elections coming up and parties considering joining the governing alliance would be wary so as not to damage their electoral chances.

SPD have retired to the Opposition to sort themselves out.

There are some points to consider. Her strong point has always been her cautious, prudent and thought-out response to the crises as they came. And most of all her humane approach, which led her to take in so many refugees.

When welcoming refugees turned sour especially after the mass rape in Cologne on New Year’s Eve, she tempered her approach by seeing to it that security was stepped up.

She has always supported the EU up to the point where she almost lost the support of her own party, especially her Finance Minister. Today, however, the EU is changing and country after country has adopted an anti-EU approach. Maybe the election result will not affect the situation and we may indeed come to see the unraveling of the EU, notwithstanding the euphoria when Macron was elected.

Her election victory may well have been a pyrrhic victory.