Angela Merkel to stand for fourth term as chancellor in 2017

German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced on Sunday that she will run for a fourth term as German chancellor in next year's election, insisting the decision had not been easy to make because of the complex challenges she will face and “absurd” expectations Germany could take a world leadership role when Barack Obama leaves office.

“I have spent an unending amount of time contemplating this, as to stand as a candidate for a fourth time after 11 years in power is anything other than a trivial decision, neither for the country, for the party, nor for me,” Merkel told a press conference in Berlin on Sunday night in what was a much-anticipated announcement.

She said just as when she first took up the post in 2005, she wanted to serve Germany. “Ever since then I have tried to orientate myself according to this principle.”

An Emnid poll on Sunday showed that some 55% of Germans want Merkel, Germany's eighth chancellor since World War Two, to serve a fourth term, with 39% against.

Merkel has steered Europe's biggest economy through the financial crisis and euro zone debt crisis and has won respect internationally, for instance, with her efforts to help solve the conflict in Ukraine.

With Trump's victory in the United States and the rise in support for right-wing parties in several European states, some commentators see Merkel as a bastion of Western liberal values.

"Angela Merkel is the answer to the populism of this time. She is, as it were, the anti-Trump," party ally Stanislaw Tillich, premier of the state of Saxony, told the RND newspaper group, adding she stood for reliability and predictability.

However, she rejected the responsibility that was pushed onto her after Trump's win as "grotesque and absurd".

"No person alone - even with the greatest experience - can change things in Germany, Europe and the world for the better, and certainly not the chancellor of Germany," she said.

Listing her main challenges, Merkel said: “The European Union is currently under great strain, with the euro crisis, with the refugee question, and following the decision of the United Kingdom to want to leave the EU, and with a situation in the world which, to put it delicately, needs to focus itself anew following the elections in America and also regarding the relationship to Russia.”

Under the circumstances she said she felt ready to run again for the German chancellery, but added: “But I have said very clearly, all that which is connected to the [current situation in the world] especially after the elections in America, that I’m expected to deal with, it’s very grounding, but I feel it very strongly as grotesque and downright absurd.

Merkel's decision last year to open Germany's borders to around 900,000 migrants, mostly from war zones in the Middle East, angered many voters at home and dented her ratings.

Her party has slumped in regional elections in the last year while support for the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) has swelled.