Angela Merkel ‘will seek fourth term as chancellor’

Merkel has long refused to be drawn on her plans for the general election, expected in September or October 2017, saying only that she would make the announcement “at the appropriate time”.

BERLIN (AP) – Germany’s main center-left party pushed back Monday against pressure to decide quickly on a challenger to Angela Merkel in next year’s election after the chancellor announced she will seek a fourth term, insisting that it will wait until January.

“I pondered a lot about it”, Merkel told reporters at a news conference in Berlin. “The decision [to run] for a fourth term is – after 11 years in office – anything but trivial”, she said after a meeting of senior members of her Christian Democrats.

Obama praised Merkel as an “outstanding partner”, adding that if “I were German and I had a vote, I might support her”.

News website Spiegel Online said the CDU would have to “motivate and mobilise” supporters who might be suffering from “Merkel fatigue”.

The veteran chancellor announced Sunday she would run again in next year’s polls and seek to govern Europe’s top economy for a total of 16 years, which would equal the marathon term of her conservative mentor, Helmut Kohl.

The chancellor, who has been in office since 2005, is being challenged by the populist right-wing AfD party.

In spite of the refugee crisis past year, Merkel is considered unrivaled in the CDU. “The situation in the world is as such that it needs to sort itself out again with regard also to the United States and Russian Federation”.

However, her decision previous year to open Germany’s borders to about one million refugees, mostly from war zones in the Middle East, angered many voters at home and dented her ratings. In September, her party suffered a significant defeat in local elections.

Ms Merkel, who grew up in communist East Germany, is a physicist who only became involved in politics after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. She is the first leader of a reunited Germany to have grown up under communism in the former East Germany.

“People would have little understanding if I would not again bring to bear all the gifts and talents which were given to me to do my duty for Germany”, she said at the party headquarters of her center-right Christian Democrats in Berlin.

What is more, with the imminent departure of U.S. President Barack Obama, Merkel alone stands as the West’s last great hope for liberal democracy – a mantle she must assume from a position of diminished standing at home, and which may prove too much.

Speaking on Sunday, Merkel specified that the resurgence of a political discourse characterized by “hate” was one of the reasons she had chose to run again.

“I want to serve Germany”, she said, adding she would “fight for our values and our way of life”.

Shaping relations with Europe and the United States under Donald Trump, how the European Union will manage a Brexit, the continuing influx of refugees into Europe will be among the major issues that would dominate the German Chancellor’s next term. But she was the first key party figure to call for Mr Kohl’s resignation in 1999 when news of a party funding scandal broke. Like leaders in France, Britain, the U.S. and elsewhere, she’ll face challenges from far-right politicians who are running on an agenda of populist nationalism.