German Chancellor Angela Merkel insisted Monday that a crisis strangling her junior coalition partner SPD would not distract the government from its work, even as questions grew on how long the fragile partnership could hold. The centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) sank into chaos after its leader Andrea Nahles said in a shock announcement Sunday that she was quitting her party’s top jobs following an European election drubbing a week earlier. As the SPD scrambled for a new leader, the chief of Merkel’s CDU party conceded that the centre-left coalition partner could end up deciding whether Germany goes to the polls before the end of the electoral term in 2021.
