Merkel vows quick change in German gov’t

UPDATED:

BERLIN | German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Monday she wants to form a new center-right government quickly — at the latest by the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s fall on Nov. 9 — after she secured a second term in office in parliamentary elections Sunday.

Exit polls and early results suggested a center-right coalition likely to be more complementary to the United States on Afghanistan and other global issues.

“Germany is entitled to have a new government quickly,” Mrs. Merkel said Monday. It would be good “if I could greet [foreign] heads of government on Nov. 9 with a new government.”

For the past four years, Mrs. Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats had shared power with the Social Democrats.

In Sunday’s election, the Social Democrats suffered their worst showing since World War II with just more than 23 percent of the vote.

“There is no talking around it — this is a bitter defeat,” Social Democrat leader Frank-Walter Steinmeier told supporters at the party’s headquarters after the polls closed.

Mrs. Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the business-friendly Free Democratic Party received about 48 percent of the votes, enough to form a coalition government that could rule for the next four years.

Mr. Steinmeier, the foreign minister, most likely will be succeeded by Free Democrat leader Guido Westerwelle, officials from the Christian Democrats and Free Democrats said. The move would make Mr. Westerwelle the world’s first openly gay foreign minister.

“We can really celebrate tonight, but afterwards we have a hard job ahead of us,” Mrs. Merkel said to a jubilant crowd at the CDU headquarters.

With the Free Democrats in government, German foreign policy is expected to be more pro-American, and Berlin’s positions on Iran and Afghanistan are likely to be closer to those of the United States, said Volker Schlegel, a former career diplomat.

On Sunday, Mrs. Merkel got what she wanted four years ago. The Christian Democrats wanted to partner with the Free Democrats, as they have done many times in the past, but their combined votes were not enough to garner the necessary majority in the Bundestag, the parliament’s lower house.

That forced the Christian Democrats into a “grand coalition” with the Social Democrats, who have governed since 1998, preventing Mrs. Merkel from implementing the reforms she promised in 2005. Now she has the mandate to do it, observers said.

“There are no more excuses for inaction,” said a Christian Democrat member who asked that his name not be used, because he was not authorized to speak publicly.

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