As expected, German voters re-elected Chancellor Angela Merkel to a fourth term on Sunday, setting her up to the be longest-serving leader of modern Germany and the undisputed leader of the European Union, the G7, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and a voice of reason on the world stage. Perhaps the only other heads of state to ever be in such a position to so shape a post-Second World War continent would be Charles de Gaulle, Margaret Thatcher or indeed Mikhail Gorbachev, and Merkel is destined to be the dominant historical leader in Europe in the current millennium.

But despite the international ramifications of Merkel’s victory, her work in Germany is undone and remains unfinished. Clearly, given the 13 per cent of popular vote garnered by the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and its 80-plus seats in the Bundestag, Merkel’s nation is now clearly divided over the way forward, questioning the very values of what it means to be modern and German. Not since 1961 has a far-right party taken seats in Germany’s lower house, and AfD’s anti-Muslim policies proved to be popular in rural regions of the former East Germany. Given that Merkel made the courageous and necessary decision to open her nation’s borders to more than a million Syrian refugees in the summer of 2015, her Christian Democrat Union (CDU) was always going to feel the heat by those who feared the influx of the desperate. The challenge now for Merkel is to defuse the right through astute policies that will wean protest voters drawn to the AfD back to the CDU’s way of thinking.

With French President Emmanuel Macron pushing for the renewal of the European experiment in a post-United Kingdom EU, Merkel will have a fine line to walk in renewing the 27-member bloc, meeting the economic challenges posed to the Eurozone by indebted nations such as Greece and Italy, and ensuring that anti-EU voters drawn to AfD are not further alienated by any new political and economic arrangement. Merkel’s comfortable win sets her up for coalition with the Greens and Freedom party. Already, the Social Democratic Party (SDP) has said it has had enough of coalition with the CDU, and is confining itself to an opposition role. It is a party that must now re-invent itself, given that it was a partner in a government led by Merkel that has brought prosperity and made the SDP a victim of its own success.