Chancellor Angela Merkel, leader of Germany’s conservative Christian Democratic Union, won the national vote Sept. 22, allowing her to govern without a coalition partner.

    GERMAN Chancellor Angela Merkel won a historic third term in power Sept. 22 — making her the only European leader not to become a casualty of Europe’s financial crisis.

    Speaking that evening, the chancellor, 59, said it was too early to discuss plans for the next government.

    Merkel said: “I see the next four years in front of me and I can promise that we will face many tasks, at home, in Europe and in the world.

    “It is too early to say how we will proceed but today we should celebrate.”

    Official results confirmed that Merkel’s conservatives won Germany’s election with 41.5 percent of the vote but indicate that they finished short of an absolute majority.

    The result is an improvement of more than eight points on the last election in 2009.

    The Union’s strong showing was also a personal victory for Merkel, who has held the position since 2005, solidifying her position as arguably Europe’s strongest political leader.

    Germany has no tradition of minority governments, and Merkel made clear that she has no intention of forming one. So she will have to put together either a “grand coalition” with the Social Democratic Party — the same combination that ran Germany in Merkel’s first term — or an improbable alliance with the environmentalist Greens.

    The chancellor will now most likely join with the center-left SPD — the equivalent to the British Labor party — which is opposed to many of her conservative principles and policies.

    Both parties are committed to saving the euro and to the ‘Mittelstand’ — small-to-medium-sized businesses that form the backbone of the export led economy.

    However, the SPD is a party of higher taxes, minimum wages and workers’ rights, limited military involvement abroad and a host of neo-liberal family policies certain to rub against Merkel’s avowed intent to carry on down the path of austerity.

    Manfred Guellner, managing director of the pollster Forsa said: “There are many within the SPD who oppose the idea of going into a grand coalition with Merkel’s bloc.”

    He added that many want assurances they will not merely be Merkel’s “Mummy’s Boys” at her beck and call for the next four years.

    An alliance with the Greens would be particularly complicated — there’s only ever been one conservative-Green state government, in liberal Hamburg, and it collapsed. There are wide policy differences between the two parties, though the Greens have moved closer to the center since they were founded by anti-capitalists, pacifists and environmentalists 33 years ago.

    A coalition could take time: In 2005, it took more than two months after an indecisive election before Merkel was sworn in as the chancellor of her first grand coalition. Even when traditional allies form a coalition in Germany, the process takes several weeks.

    “Thoroughness goes before speed,” Merkel said Monday, refusing to be drawn on how long the process might take. She said that “Germany needs a stable government, and we will fulfill this task.”

    Merkel said she had been in contact with Social Democrat chairman Sigmar Gabriel but he told her — “understandably, I must say” — that he wanted to wait for a party convention before going further.

    A grand coalition might result in a somewhat greater emphasis on bolstering economic growth in Europe over the austerity that Germany has insisted on in exchange for bailing out economically weak countries such as Greece. However, Merkel has vehemently rejected any pooling of German debt with that of other European countries — something that the center-left parties are somewhat more open to.

    Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble signaled that Merkel’s party may soften its resistance to the tax rises demanded in the campaign by the SPD to pay for public spending.

    “We will have to see how the talks go,” Schaeuble said when asked about the tax issue by the Zeit weekly, suggesting that Merkel’s team is ready for compromise in what may be weeks if not months of horse-trading on policy and ministry posts.

    The veteran minister said that he personally did not favor tax rises but also reached out, saying: “If the future partners for a future government show a modicum of sense, we will surely be able to reach an agreement.”

    Schaeuble urged speed in talks on who will jointly rule the EU’s biggest economy, warning that “since important decisions are looming in European politics, including on a banking union, I would prefer that we reach agreement quickly.”

    The chancellor’s spokesman Steffen Seibert meanwhile stressed that her government is “fully capable of operating” and working at all levels, despite the tough coalition-building process.

    Merkel said Monday that agreements have already been made to invest more in combating youth unemployment and other problems.

    “Our European policy course, at least on the part of the Union (party), will not change,” Merkel said.

    After eight years at the helm of the top European economy, and three as the go-to leader in the eurozone crisis, Merkel was rewarded for navigating the country through the turmoil and leaving it stronger than before.

    The girl born Angela Kasner in 1954 left Hamburg in then West Germany a few weeks after her birth when her Protestant preacher father decided to tend to the flock in the East.

    Locals remember her fierce intellect and discretion as a Christian in a totalitarian state.

    She earned a physics doctorate, married and divorced fellow student Ulrich Merkel, and stayed out of politics until the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.

    In 1990 she joined the CDU and won her first parliamentary seat.

    Then-Chancellor Helmut Kohl made her minister for women’s issues and later environmental affairs, and bestowed on her the fond but patronizing nickname “the girl.”

    But in 2000, the frumpy newcomer rose to the head of the CDU when she alone had the courage to tell Kohl to quit as party chairman over a slush fund scandal.

    In 2005 she unseated SPD chancellor Gerhard Schroeder after seven years in power, becoming Germany’s first female chancellor as well as its youngest.

    She is also the only woman to lead a major European power since Margaret Thatcher of Britain.

    During her first term, Merkel presided over a loveless “grand coalition” between the conservatives and their traditional rivals, the SPD.

    Forbes magazine has named her the world’s most powerful woman for seven out of the last eight years.

    Merkel was a staunch defender of nuclear power until Japan’s Fukushima disaster in 2011, prompting a dizzying about-face that has seen her pledge to phase out all of Germany’s nuclear power reactors by 2022.

    A lover of German opera, French red wine and walking holidays in the Italian mountains, Merkel has repeatedly pointed to the iconic Swabian housewife — a paragon of thrift and self-control — as her model.

    She remarried in 1998. Her chemist husband Joachim Sauer so rarely appears in public that he is nicknamed “The Phantom of the Opera.”(SD-Agencies)