New Order Indefinitely Bars Almost All Travel From Seven Countries
Demonstrators protesting the Trump administration’s immigration policies in March in Union Square in New York. Credit Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
WASHINGTON — President Trump on Sunday issued a new order indefinitely banning almost all travel to the United States from seven countries, including most of the nations covered by his original travel ban, citing threats to national security posed by letting their citizens into the country.
The new order is more far-reaching than the president’s original travel ban, imposing permanent restrictions on travel, rather than the 90-day suspension that Mr. Trump authorized soon after taking office. But officials said his new action was the result of a deliberative, rigorous examination of security risks that was designed to avoid the chaotic rollout of his first ban. And the addition of non-Muslim countries could address the legal attacks on earlier travel restrictions as discrimination based on religion.
Starting next month, most citizens of Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Chad and North Korea will be banned from entering the United States, Mr. Trump said in a proclamation released Sunday night. Citizens of Iraq and some groups of people in Venezuela who seek to visit the United States will face restrictions or heightened scrutiny.
Mr. Trump’s original travel ban, which caused chaos at airports earlier this year and set off a furious legal challenge to the president’s authority, expired on Sunday even as the Supreme Court is set to hear arguments about its constitutionality on Oct. 10. The new order — Chad, North Korea and Venezuela are new to the list of affected countries — will take effect Oct. 18.
“As president, I must act to protect the security and interests of the United States and its people,” Mr. Trump said in the proclamation, which White House officials said had the same force as an executive order. He added that the restrictions will remain in effect until the governments of the affected nations “satisfactorily address the identified inadequacies.”
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Officials described the new order as a much more targeted effort than the president’s earlier one. Each of the countries will be under its own set of travel restrictions, though in most cases citizens of the countries will be unable to emigrate to the United States personally and most will be barred from coming to work, study or vacation in America.
Iran, for example, will still be able to send its citizens on student exchanges, though such visitors will be subject to enhanced screening. Certain government officials of Venezuela and their families will be barred from visiting the United States. Somalis will no longer be allowed to emigrate to the United States, but may visit with extra screening.
Administration officials said that the new rules would not apply to legal permanent residents of the United States, and that visitors who currently hold valid visas from the countries listed will not have their visas revoked.
That means that students already studying in the United States can finish their studies and employees of businesses in the United States who are from the targeted countries may stay for as long as their existing visas remain valid. People whose visas expire will be subject to the travel ban, officials said.
People seeking access to the United States as refugees are not covered by the proclamation, officials said. Entry of refugees is currently limited by the president’s original travel ban, and officials said the administration was preparing new rules for refugees that should be announced within days.
Reaction to the president’s announcement was swift, as some critics of the original travel ban expressed similar concerns about the president’s latest effort to toughen the country’s border against potential terrorists and criminals.
“President Trump’s latest attempt at a ‘Muslim ban,’ like all the others, undermines fundamental American and Jewish values with its explicit bigotry and xenophobia,” said Stosh Cotler, the chief executive of Bend the Arc Jewish Action. “These immoral restrictions, which make no actual contribution to protecting our country, send an unmistakable message to Muslims and immigrants in the United States and around the world: ‘You are not welcome here.’”
But administration officials — who have long rejected the characterization of the president’s travel restrictions as a “Muslim ban,” — noted that the latest effort also applies to non-Muslim countries and was based on a rigorous evaluation of each country’s security capabilities.
One official who briefed reporters on Sunday evening insisted that the president’s travel restrictions were “never, ever, ever” based on race, religion or creed.
In a statement released by the White House, Mr. Trump defended the new proclamation, saying that “we cannot afford to continue the failed policies of the past, which present an unacceptable danger to our country. My highest obligation is to ensure the safety and security of the American people, and in issuing this new travel order, I am fulfilling that sacred obligation.”
The president’s announcement comes after the administration conducted what they described as an in-depth, worldwide, 90-day review of the security measures in place in other countries to prevent terrorists or criminals from entering the United States by applying to emigrate or to visit with a tourist, work or education visa.
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Mr. Trump called for the review — and a temporary ban on travel from several majority-Muslim countries — just days after being inaugurated. But a fierce legal challenge to the travel ban delayed the security assessment until the summer.
Officials said last week that most nations already met new, minimum standards for identifying and screening potential travelers and sharing investigative information with law enforcement agencies in the United States. Some nations that initially fell short of those standards agreed to implement changes to avoid travel restrictions.
But several countries either failed to meet those standards or flatly refused, officials said. Homeland Security officials recommended to Mr. Trump in a report last week that he impose the new travel restrictions on the residents of those countries. The president’s 15-page proclamation accepted the recommendations, spelling them out in detail.
The proclamation imposes the most severe restrictions on Syria and North Korea, which Mr. Trump says fail to cooperate with the United States in any respect. All citizens from those countries will be denied visas to enter the United States once the proclamation goes into effect.
Most citizens of Chad, Libya and Yemen will be blocked from emigrating to or visiting the United States because the countries do not have the technical capability to identify and screen their travelers, and in many cases have terrorist networks in their countries, officials said.
Officials said Somalia did, barely, meet the security standards set by the United States, but will still be subject to a ban on emigration and heightened scrutiny for travel because it is a safe haven for terrorists. Officials said that Iran was uncooperative and would be subject to a broad travel ban, but Mr. Trump made an exception for student and exchange visas.
In Venezuela, Mr. Trump restricted only the travel of government officials and their families, writing in the proclamation that the ban was focused on that group because they were “responsible for the identified inadequacies” in sharing information about travelers.
Mr. Trump’s original travel ban prevented all travel from citizens of seven countries: Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. Iraq was later removed from a second version of the travel ban in March after American officials said it had improved its ability to screen passengers and share information with the United States. In the new security review, Sudan was deemed to meet the security standards and was removed from the list of countries with travel restrictions.
Homeland Security officials had described the previous ban as a temporary pause on travel from certain countries to allow for the review of security measures.
By contrast, the new travel restrictions will be in place indefinitely, officials said. The United States will consider lifting the restrictions on those countries affected only if they meet the new minimum standards, they said.
The president’s announcement could have a dramatic impact on the legal challenge to the previous travel ban, which is under consideration by the Supreme Court after the administration appealed lower court rulings that said the ban was unconstitutional and a breach of Mr. Trump’s authority.
Oral arguments in the case are scheduled for Oct. 10, but legal experts said that parts of the case could be moot because of the president’s decision to end that travel ban. Other parts of the case, including restrictions on refugees coming into the United States, were not affected by Sunday’s announcement.
A spokeswoman for the Justice Department said Sunday that the solicitor general would be submitting an update to the Supreme Court about the latest travel restrictions on Sunday evening. The spokeswoman said the administration would continue to defend the president’s “lawful authority to issue his executive order.”
But lawyers who filed challenges to the president’s previous travel ban left open the possibility that they would also challenge the new restrictions.
“This is an apparent effort to paper over the original sin of the Muslim ban, especially when just last week Trump said he wanted a ‘larger, tougher, more specific’ ban,” said Anthony D. Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union.
The original travel ban was met with angry denunciations from civil rights activists and others who said the president was violating the Constitution by specifically targeting Muslims. They also criticized Mr. Trump’s administration for abruptly imposing the ban, causing chaos at airports as visitors were turned away by border agents who had not been briefed on the new policy.
Administration officials said on Friday that the new policy was the result of months of deliberation that included the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, the White House and other agencies involved in security and the border.
Is Trump All Talk on North Korea? The Uncertainty Sends a Shiver
By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVISSEPT. 24, 2017
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South Koreans at a rail station in Seoul watched Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, deliver a statement last week. Mr. Kim called President Trump “deranged.” Credit Jung Yeon-Je/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
WASHINGTON — When President Trump gave a fiery campaign speech in Huntsville, Ala., on Friday evening, he drew a rapturous roar by ridiculing Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, as “Little Rocket Man.”
Among diplomats and national security specialists, the reaction was decidedly different. After Mr. Trump repeated his taunt in a tweet late Saturday and threatened that Mr. Kim and his foreign minister “won’t be around much longer” if they continue their invective against the United States, reactions ranged from nervous disbelief to sheer terror.
Mr. Trump’s willingness to casually threaten to annihilate a nuclear-armed foe was yet another reminder of the steep risks inherent in his brute-force approach to diplomacy. His strengths as a politician — the ability to appeal in a visceral way to the impulses of ordinary citizens — are a difficult fit for the meticulous calculations that his own advisers concede are crucial in dealing with Pyongyang.
The disconnect has led to a deep uncertainty about whether Mr. Trump is all talk or actually intends to act. The ambiguity could be strategic, part of an effort to intimidate Mr. Kim and keep him guessing. Or it could reflect a rash impulse by a leader with little foreign policy experience to vent his anger and stoke his supporters’ enthusiasm.
His new chief of staff and his national security team have drawn a line at trying to rein in his more incendiary provocations, fearing that their efforts could backfire with a president who bridles at any effort to control him. What remains unclear — and the source of much of the anxiety in and out of the government and on both sides of the Pacific — is whether they would step in to prevent the president from taking the kind of drastic action that matches his words, if they believed it was imminent.
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Veterans of diplomacy and national security and specialists on North Korea fear that, whatever their intended result, Mr. Trump’s increasingly bellicose threats and public insults of the famously thin-skinned Mr. Kim could cause the United States to careen into a nuclear confrontation driven by personal animosity and bravado.
“It does matter, because you don’t want to get to a situation where North Korea fundamentally miscalculates that an attack is coming,” said Sue Mi Terry, a former intelligence and National Security Council specialist who is now a senior adviser for Korea at Bower Group Asia. “It could lead us to stumble into a war that nobody wants.”
And while his bombast may be a thrill to Mr. Trump’s core supporters, there is evidence that the broader American public does not trust the president to deal with North Korea, and is deeply opposed to the kind of pre-emptive military strike he has seemed eager to threaten.
A new Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 37 percent of adults trust Mr. Trump “a great deal” or “a good amount” to responsibly handle the situation with North Korea, while 42 percent trust him “not at all.” By contrast, 72 percent trust American military leaders, who have largely avoided combative language on North Korea even as they have said publicly that a military option is possible.
Two-thirds of respondents opposed launching a pre-emptive attack against North Korea, while about three-quarters supported using tougher economic sanctions on Pyongyang as a way of pressuring the country to surrender its nuclear arsenal.
Some senior administration officials acknowledge privately that Mr. Trump’s rhetoric on North Korea is not helpful, although they question whether it will alter the discussion, given how far Mr. Kim has come in his quest to develop a nuclear weapon that could reach the United States.
The three current and retired generals advising Mr. Trump — Jim Mattis, the defense secretary; Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, his national security adviser; and John F. Kelly, his chief of staff — as well as Rex W. Tillerson, the secretary of state, have all chosen their words on North Korea more carefully, emphasizing the role of diplomacy and the grave stakes of any military confrontation.
“All three of the generals fully realize the carnage that would result from a war on the Korean Peninsula,” James G. Stavridis, the former NATO commander and current dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, said on Sunday.
“Knowing each of them personally, I am certain they are counseling operational caution, measured public commentary and building a coalition approach to dealing with Kim Jong-un,” Mr. Stavridis, a retired admiral, said in an email. “But controlling President Trump seems incredibly difficult. Let’s hope they are not engaged in mission impossible, because the stakes are so high.”
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Christopher R. Hill, a former ambassador to South Korea who served Republican and Democratic presidents, argued that the comments could badly undercut Mr. Trump’s ability to find a peaceful solution to the dispute, playing into Mr. Kim’s characterization of the United States as an evil nation bent on North Korea’s destruction and relieving pressure on the Chinese to do more to curb Pyongyang.
“The comments give the world the sense that he is increasingly unhinged and unreliable,” said Mr. Hill, the dean of the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver.
Mr. Hill, who as envoy to South Korea under George W. Bush was the last American to hold formal talks with the government in Pyongyang, said he and Condoleezza Rice, then the secretary of state, routinely advised Mr. Bush to “avoid the personal invectives,” because “they never help.”
“My sense from four years of those talks is that getting personal is not helpful,” Mr. Hill said. “Who could be telling Trump otherwise?”
Yet current and former senior officials said it was clear that Mr. Trump would continue his brinkmanship, particularly his belligerent tweets, no matter what his advisers do or say. One former administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal policy workings, said nobody, including Mr. Kelly, could control the president’s social media utterances, despite what his military advisers thought about them.
The tweets most likely have forced Mr. Mattis and Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as other national security officials, to spend a significant amount of time on the phone reassuring counterparts about Mr. Trump’s intentions.
Last week, Mr. Trump coined his mocking nickname for Mr. Kim on Twitter and insisted on including it in his maiden speech to the United Nations General Assembly. “Rocket Man,” he said, “is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime,” which may leave the United States “no choice than to totally destroy North Korea.”
The speech drew audible gasps from the diplomats and national security officials in the General Assembly hall, as well as an angry response from Mr. Kim himself, who called Mr. Trump a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard.” A few days later, a capacity crowd at the Von Braun Center in Huntsville delighted in Mr. Trump’s warlike language, cheering as he renewed his threats and added a dig at Mr. Kim’s stature.
“He should have been handled a long time ago,” Mr. Trump said, “but I’m going to handle it because we have to handle it: Little Rocket Man.”
“I’m sure he’s listening, because he watches every word,” Mr. Trump added. “He’s watching us like he never watched anybody before, that I can tell you.”
The president appeared to be right about that. On Saturday, Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho of North Korea said in a speech at the United Nations that the president’s threats were “making our rocket’s visit to the entire U.S. mainland inevitable all the more.”
That is what appeared to have prompted the nighttime tweet from Mr. Trump, who spent the weekend at his Bedminster, N.J., golf resort. “If he echoes thoughts of Little Rocket Man,” Mr. Trump wrote of Mr. Ri, “they won’t be around much longer!”
Ms. Terry said such menacing talk could put Mr. Trump into a box. “Trump is limiting our own options by behaving and speaking like this, because now we either have to act, which really is unthinkable, or we’re going to look like a paper tiger because we can’t act,” she said. “Internationally, we look foolish, and now he has made it extremely personal, so Kim Jong-un cannot back down. It’s reckless.”
Some of Mr. Trump’s allies argue that his behavior is strategic, a way of telegraphing to North Korea — and to its primary patron, China — that the United States is taking a tougher line under this administration. There may be wisdom, they argue, in spurring fear and confusion in the mind of a leader who frequently relies on both.
“We’re dealing with somebody that we’ll figure out,” Mr. Trump said at the rally on Friday. “He may be smart, he may be strategic — and he may be totally crazy.”
A Divider Not a Uniter, Trump Widens the Breach
By PETER BAKERSEPT. 24, 2017
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President Trump boarding Air Force One at Morristown Municipal Airport in New Jersey on his way back to the White House on Sunday. Credit Tom Brenner/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — Over the course of just 17 hours this weekend, President Trump assailed John McCain, Chuck Schumer, Stephen Curry, the National Football League, Roger Goodell, Iran and Kim Jong-un — the “Little Rocket Man.” And that was on his day off.
While football players knelt, locked arms or stayed in their locker rooms during the national anthem in protest on Sunday, any notion that Mr. Trump may soften his edge, even under the discipline of a new chief of staff, seemed fanciful. While he has restrained himself for brief stretches, his penchant for punching eventually reasserts itself.
Never in modern times has there been an occupant of the Oval Office who seemed to reject so thoroughly the nostrum that a president’s duty is to bring the country together. Relentlessly pugnacious, energized by a fight, unwilling to let any slight go unanswered, Mr. Trump has made himself America’s apostle of anger, its deacon of divisiveness.
His denunciation of what he called unpatriotic sports stars protesting racial injustice by not standing for the national anthem clearly cheered supporters at a rally in Huntsville, Ala., on Friday. For his admirers, his attacks on entitled elites can be bracing and invigorating, finally giving voice to grievances they consider long ignored. Whether by design or not, they also distract from other matters, in this case another looming legislative debacle as his health care bill faces defeat in the Senate.
In his brief career as president and a candidate for president, Mr. Trump has attacked virtually every major institution in American life: Congress, the courts, Democrats, Republicans, the news media, the Justice Department, Hollywood, the military, NATO, the intelligence agencies, the cast of “Hamilton,” the cast of “Saturday Night Live,” the pope and now professional sports. He has attacked the Trump administration itself, or at least selected parts of it (see Sessions, Jeff), and even the United States of America (“you think our country’s so innocent?”).
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“The Trump credo seems to be so many people to attack, so little time,” said Peter Wehner, a former strategic adviser to President George W. Bush and now a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Which, of course, is one reason so many wonder why he makes certain exceptions to his lash-out-at-everyone rule, particularly President Vladimir V. Putin in Russia and white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va.
“I don’t think his intention is to be divisive,” said Christopher Ruddy, the chief executive of Newsmax Media and a friend of Mr. Trump’s. “He wants to be viewed as strong but also someone who speaks the truth as he sees it and not afraid what the establishment says about it. He enjoys a fight and a challenge, so that may play into some of this.
“My own view,” he added, “is that he should adapt Floyd Mayweather’s boxing style — hold most of his punches for big opportunities, and tire out your opponents for a win in later rounds.”
Intentional or not, many of his most divisive comments charge directly into one of the most delicate issues in American life, race, whether it be his attacks on illegal immigrants, his “both sides” equivocation after the racial violence in Charlottesville or now his blasts at African-American football and basketball stars like Mr. Curry, the Golden State Warriors player who said he did not want to visit the White House for a traditional champions ceremony.
Speaking with reporters before boarding Air Force One on Sunday, Mr. Trump insisted race was not the issue. “This has nothing to do with race,” he said. “I never said anything about race. This has nothing to do with race or anything else. This has to do with respect for our country and respect for our flag.”
To his supporters, Mr. Trump’s approach does not necessarily seem polarizing so much as animating. In an us-and-them world, he is speaking to a part of the country that has long felt ostracized by those who seem to have everything, whether it be Washington politicians or high-paid sports stars.
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“These attacks sound divisive to the people outside that ‘us’ — and Trump’s ‘us’ is a lot smaller than most presidents’ — but not to those inside it,” said Nicole Hemmer, a scholar of conservatism and social movements at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.
“There’s a larger politics of grievance at work,” she added, and “the base’s desire for Trump to be tough and combative” is one seen in other presidents, if less often and openly. Richard M. Nixon appealed to the “silent majority,” and Bill Clinton castigated an African-American rap star named Sister Souljah to reach out to disaffected white voters who had fled the Democratic Party.
Mr. Wehner, however, said Mr. Trump seemed to “draw a kind of psychic energy” from conflict. “We’ve never had a president who so relishes producing animosity and hate among Americans, and who does it so consistently, so gleefully and so intentionally,” he said. And when there are no obvious targets, he added, Mr. Trump goes in search of them. “He seems to have a psychological need to keep everyone around him on edge and at each other’s throats.”
Open appeals to division, while increasingly common on the campaign trail, have been rarer in the modern White House. Ronald Reagan presented a sunny optimistic view of America as a “shining city on a hill.” The first George Bush called for a “kinder, gentler” America. Mr. Clinton vowed to “repair the breach” of partisanship. The younger Mr. Bush promised to be a “uniter, not a divider.” Barack Obama declared that “we are not a collection of red states and blue states; we are the United States of America.”
None of them fully lived up to those ideals, and at times each of them appealed to division in the conduct of his presidency or campaigns. The elder Mr. Bush’s election was remembered for the racially charged debate over the furloughed murderer Willie Horton. The younger Mr. Bush’s critics complained that he impugned their patriotism for criticizing his national security policies, while Mr. Obama’s opponents complained that he regularly questioned their motives and talked down to them.
In 2015, Gallup found that the second Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama were the most polarizing presidents in modern times, as measured by the gap between how Republicans and Democrats saw them. At that point, Mr. Obama held six of the top 10 years of that polarization index and Mr. Bush the other four.
But neither Mr. Bush nor Mr. Obama overtly aspired to division, and each found the polarization of his time dispiriting. Mr. Obama lamented in his State of the Union address in 2016 that he was unable to bridge the divide.
Mr. Trump seems wholly uninterested in trying and in that sense may be a president who suits his era better than his predecessors. He is a divisive president for a divisive time.
“We know previous presidents pursued political strategies that exploited racial divisions in our country,” said Ellen Fitzpatrick, a history professor at the University of New Hampshire. “We know Nixon had his enemies list. But the public whipping up of this sentiment in mass campaign-style rallies with the crass language Trump used in Huntsville has no precedent I am aware of.”
H. W. Brands, a biographer of Reagan and other presidents at the University of Texas at Austin, said other presidents were tactically divisive. Andrew Jackson pilloried the moneyed classes, while Theodore Roosevelt inveighed against the “malefactors of great wealth.” Franklin D. Roosevelt blamed the stock market crash on the “money changers” and said he welcomed their hatred of him.
“Trump’s divisiveness looks different,” Mr. Brands said. “It appears more impulsive and more a matter of simply stirring the pot. It makes sense from the perspective of one who has long sought to attract media attention. There doesn’t seem to be any larger purpose. I really can’t see what he hopes to win by taking on the N.F.L.”
Angela Merkel Makes History in German Vote, but So Does Far Right
BERLIN — Angela Merkel won a fourth term as chancellor in elections on Sunday, placing her in the front ranks of Germany’s postwar leaders, even as her victory was dimmed by the entry of a far-right party into parliament for the first time in more than 60 years, according to preliminary results.
The far-right party, Alternative for Germany, or AfD, got some 13 percent of the vote — nearly three times the 4.7 percent it received in 2013 — a significant showing of voter anger over immigration and inequality as support for the two main parties sagged from four years ago.
Ms. Merkel and her center-right Christian Democrats won, the center held, but it was weakened. The results made clear that far-right populism — and anxieties over security and national identity — were far from dead in Europe.
They also showed that Germany’s mainstream parties were not immune to the same troubles that have afflicted mainstream parties across the Continent, from Italy to France to Britain.
“We expected a better result, that is clear,” Ms. Merkel said Sunday night. “The good thing is that we will definitely lead the next government.”
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She said that she would listen to those who voted for the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, and work to win them back “by solving problems, by taking up their worries, partly also their fears, but above all by good politics,” she said.
But her comments seemed to augur a shift to the right and more of an emphasis on controls over borders, migration and security.
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Christian Democratic Union supporters celebrating exit polls at the party headquarters in Berlin on Sunday — although the conservative bloc’s share of the votes was sharply down from 2013. Credit Kai Pfaffenbach/Reuters
Despite her victory, Ms. Merkel and her conservatives cannot rule alone, making it probable that the chancellor’s political life in her fourth term will be substantially more complicated.
The shape and policies of a new governing coalition will involve weeks of painstaking negotiations. Smiling, Ms. Merkel said Sunday night that she hoped to have a new government “by Christmas.”
The center-left Social Democrats, Ms. Merkel’s coalition partners for the last four years, ran a poor second to her center-right grouping, and the Social Democrats announced Sunday evening that the party would go into opposition, hoping to rebuild their political profile.
But the step would also make sure that the AfD, stays on the political sidelines and does not become the country’s official opposition.
The Alternative for Germany nonetheless vowed to shake the consensus politics of Germany, and in breaking a postwar taboo by entering parliament, it already had.
Alexander Gauland, one of AfD’s leaders, told party supporters after the results that in parliament: “We will go after them. We will claim back our country.”
To cheers, he said: “We did it. We are in the German parliament and we will change Germany.”
Burkhard Schröder, an AfD member since 2014 from Düsseldorf, was ecstatic. “We are absolutely euphoric here,” he said. “This is a strong victory for us that has weakened Angela Merkel.”
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“We will go after them,” Alexander Gauland, one of the leaders of Alternative for Germany, told party supporters on Sunday. “We will claim back our country.” Credit Michael Probst/Associated Press
Up to 700 protesters gathered outside the AfD’s election night party, chanting slogans like “All of Berlin, hate the AfD.”
“It’s important to show that it’s not normal that a neofascist party got into the German parliament,” said Dirk Schuck, 41, a political scientist at the University of Leipzig.
While both Ms. Merkel and the Social Democrats lost significant voter support from 2013, her victory vaults her into the ranks of Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Kohl, the only postwar chancellors to win four national elections.
The election is a remarkable capstone for Ms. Merkel, 63, the first East German and the first woman to become chancellor.
It also represents a vindication of her pragmatic leadership and confidence in her stewardship of Europe’s largest economy and of the European Union itself in the face of populism, challenges from Russia and China and uncertainty created by the unpredictable policies of President Trump.
Even so, the advance of the far right was a cold slap for her and he Christian Democratic Union, or CDU. The AfD made particular inroads in the former East Germany but also in Bavaria, where Ms. Merkel’s sister party, the Christian Social Union, or CSU, has long ruled but lost some 10 percent of its vote over 2013.
Horst Seehofer, the CSU leader, said: “We made the mistake of having the right flank open.”
A critic of Ms. Merkel’s immigration policies, he added: “We have a vacuum on the right, we will close it with politics that ensure Germany remains Germany.”
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Martin Schulz, leader of the Social Democrats, at a polling station in Würselen, in western Germany. Credit Sascha Schuermann/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The late leader of that party, Franz-Josef Strauss, said in 1986 that the party should allow no one to run to their right. “To the right of us there is only the wall,” he said.
Mr. Seehofer echoed that insight Sunday night. But others cautioned calm.
“We will remember today in history,” said Thomas Heilmann, a member of parliament from the CDU, in an email interview. “As in the U.S., hate became part of politics. The CDU cannot and must not match this attitude.”
Governing Germany “will become more difficult,” Mr. Heilmann added. “It is definitely not a good day for Germany and most likely not good for Europe either.”
Clemens Fuest, the director of IFO, the Institute for Economic Research in Munich, said that the results showed wide concern about “security, immigration and possible challenges to the German economic model, like globalization,” he said.
These mattered more than the Social Democrats’ concentration on injustice and inequality, he said.
The other parties should make less of the AfD showing “and instead ask themselves what questions they have not answered” — questions of borders, migration and the pressures on Germany to do more to prop up other countries of the European Union.
Ms. Merkel’s conservative bloc won some 32.9 percent of the vote, sharply down from 41.5 percent in 2013, the early results showed.
The Social Democrats slumped to 20.8 percent, a new postwar low, down from 25.7 percent four years ago.
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If the Social Democrats hold to their intention to go into opposition, Ms. Merkel will be faced with an unusually difficult task to form a working coalition. Given the numbers, it would seem that she will have to cobble together her own Christian Democrat-Christian Social Union bloc together with two other parties.
The potential new partners inhabit virtually opposite poles on the political spectrum — the pro-business Free Democrats, who won some 10.4 percent of the vote, and the left-leaning pro-environment Greens, who won about 9 percent.
At the Christian Democrat headquarters, Frank Wexler, a Berliner, called the results “a bit depressing.”
Grand coalitions had allowed the small parties to gain ground, he said. “The main parties are getting smaller,” Mr. Wexler said. To counteract the AfD, he said, “We need to address the issue of strengthening the borders.”
But Mr. Wexler said he was most disturbed by the AfD’s hostility to the European Union. “This is what Germany needs to do — be a strong leader in Europe.”
But Hans Kundnani, an expert on Germany with the German Marshall Fund, said that Ms. Merkel might fail to create the three-party coalition, putting the Social Democrats under great pressure to join another coalition rather than forcing new elections.
To Mr. Kundnani, “the big shock is not the AfD,” but the loss of support for Ms. Merkel’s conservatives and the increasing fragmentation of German political life.
Photo
A protest in Berlin against the Alternative for Germany party on Sunday, with posters like “Xenophobia is not an alternative.” Credit Wolfgang Rattay/Reuters
Germany has a complicated system of proportional representation, in which each voter casts one ballot for their local representative and one ballot for a political party. Those elected locally get their seats.
But the parties’ overall share of seats in parliament is determined by the percentage of votes they win. Turnout was 75.9 percent, up from 71.5 percent in 2013, but a long way from the 90 percent turnout figures of the 1980s.
Though initially reluctant to run for a fourth term, Ms. Merkel threw herself into the campaign, especially as the government has brought some order to the chaos engendered in 2015 when she threw the country’s borders open to refugees and migrants.
But the backlash over the migrant crisis, coupled with her long period in office and the wishy-washy nature of grand coalition politics, has led to more support for the more extreme, anti-European parties like the AfD and The Left, the heir of the East German Communist Party, which came in third in 2013 and won about 9 percent of the vote on Sunday.
In Dresden, Gert Frülling, 75, a retiree, declined to divulge his party preference, but made it clear that he was sympathetic to some of the Alternative for Germany’s proposals.
“It all happened too fast,” he said, referring to the time after Germany’s reunification. “Dresdenis a city of bureaucrats and soldiers, and they dumped all this multiculturalism on us at once. I know we had to change, but it should have happened more gradually.”
He said it would be wrong for other parties to refuse to work with the AfD in Parliament. “If they present good ideas,” he said, “I think it’s not fair to boycott them.”
In Neustadt, a gentrifying area of Dresden, Rebecca Klingenburg, 20, was clearly excited to be one of an estimated three million first-time voters.
“One gets to decide on what country one wants to live,” she said. A mechanical-engineering student, Ms. Klingenburg said she was voting to maintain Germany’s orientation toward Europe, at a time of rising nationalism.
“I learned four languages in school,” she said. “I want to make sure that we stay internationally oriented.”
Reporting was contributed by Jack Ewing,
Merkel gets a fourth term but German voters deliver far-right surge
By Fred Pleitgen and James Masters, CNN
Updated 0043 GMT (0843 HKT) September 25, 2017
Merkel's party receives lowest support in years
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Merkel's party receives lowest support in years 01:59
Berlin (CNN)Angela Merkel has won a fourth term as German Chancellor, but with her party's lead in parliament cut and the country facing a surge in support for the far right.
Exit polls predicted the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) would become the third-largest group in the national parliament, the Bundestag, as German voters delivered a stinging blow to the traditional parties.
Merkel's center-right CDU and its sister CSU had their share of the vote slashed. Germany's oldest party, the center-left SPD, which had been in a "grand coalition" with Merkel, was consigned to opposition.
Addressing her supporters, a subdued Merkel said the result gave her a "mandate" to govern but that the AfD's success would require "thorough analysis" to understand the concerns of their voters.
The exit polls showed Merkel's CDU/CSU group would be the largest in the Bundestag, but with its lead cut to 33.5% of the seats, down from 41.5% in 2013. The SPD fell to 21% from 25.7%, a result met with shock at the party's headquarters. It was the CDU's worst result since 1949, and the SPD's worst since 1945.
The AfD, founded only four years ago, became the first far-right party to enter the Bundestag since 1961, with a seat projection of 13%, according to FORSA polling institute data commissioned by German public broadcaster ZDF.
Addressing her supporters, Merkel pledged to try and understand the concerns of voters who lent their support to the AfD. "There's a big new challenge for us, and that is the entry of the AfD in the Bundestag," she said. "We want to win back AfD voters."
SPD leader Martin Schulz said the result was a "bitter disappointment" and the party would not continue in coalition. During the election campaign, Schulz found it hard to mount an effective opposition to Merkel, as his party had been inextricably linked to her policy decisions. More symbolically, had the SPD remained in coalition, the AfD would have been the largest opposition party.
Rise of AfD
The AfD's local party leader in Berlin, Georg Pazderski, declared its success a "political earthquake."
Founded in 2013, the AfD rose to prominence on the back of an anti-immigration stance and its opposition to Merkel's decision to open the country's borders to over a million migrants, mainly those fleeing violence and persecution from the Middle East. The party's opponents say it has stoked Islamophobia in Germany.
The AfD polled particularly strongly in East Germany, which includes Berlin, attracting 21.5% of the vote, according to exit polling conducted by by Infratest Dimap. In the West, it scored about 11%, the projections said. The results put the AfD on course to become the second largest party in the East, after the CDU.
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"For the first time, we have a conservative party right beside our Christian Democrats and this is because they moved more and more to the left and we moved into the vacuum," Pazderski told CNN.
Why the German elections matter to the rest of the world
Why the German elections matter to the rest of the world
"It's a good day for democracy for Germany and for Europe."
Alice Weidel, a leading AfD figure, told supporters she would keep her promise to call for a committee to investigate Merkel's decision to allow more than a million refugees into the country in 2015.
She had repeatedly claimed that Merkel should be "punished" for her decisions during the refugee crisis. "People have given us their trust and we will keep our promise," she said.
Opponents of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) protest against the result of the AfD.
Opponents of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) protest against the result of the AfD.
There were protests outside the party's headquarters in Berlin after the provisional results came through on Sunday. Protesters chanted "Nazis out" and sang "say it loud, say it clear, refugees are welcome here."
Far-right party wins seats in German parliament for first time in decades
Far-right party wins seats in German parliament for first time in decades
The European Jewish Congress called on the major parties to shun the AfD in parliament. "We trust that centrist parties in the Bundestag will ensure that the AfD has no representation in the coming governing coalition," Dr. Moshe Kantor, President of the EJC, said.
"Some of the positions it has espoused during the election campaign display alarming levels of intolerance not seen in Germany for many decades and which are, of course, of great concerns to German and European Jews."
