Winds of political change are blowing across Europe and politicians who fail to engage will face the same fate as Mrs Merkel.
Critics are claiming her open-door policy on European migration led to her downfall.
Her seeming refusal to listen to the concerns of millions of Germans and Europeans may have inadvertently triggered the rise of a network of smaller ‘populist’ parties across the continent – and is dissatisfaction with Merkel bot at home and abroad.
Since 2011 she has consistently been named by Forbes magazine as the most powerful woman in the world – taking over from Michele Obama.
But her reign looks likely to be over.
Last night’s state election in Hesse was the line in the sand – and she knew it.
If the CDU did well she would live to fight and almost certainly win the party chairmanship in December – if the CDU faltered too many in her party were already sharpening the knives.
The CDU bombed.
Although they won overall their majority was slashed by almost 27 percent – from 38.3 percent to 28 percent – and she had to walk.
The Hesse vote came on the back of a terrible performance by her coalition partners at the Bavarian ballot box weeks earlier – a sign that the Merkel era was drawing to a close.
Merkel faced three key issues threatening to destroy her fragile coalition government and her own weakening grip on power.
At the heart was the confused coalition she was the head of.
The Bavarian branch of her conservative movement has openly chased the far-right vote – but the voters seemed to prefer the actually right wing AfD or the polar opposite the Greens.
SPD members blame the uneasy coalition with Mrs Merkel’s CDU/CSU union which has stumbled, in an ill-tempered and fractious manner, from crisis to crisis.
But then there is the rise of anti-EU populism which Mrs Merkel has been both slow to appreciate and even slower to combat.
The old traditional centre-right parties like the CDU and the centre-left are falling out of fashion with voters who are turning instead to smaller, populist and openly anti-EU political parties.
And a revitalised Green party is also emerging as a serious contender again.
Germany’s political landscape for long so predictable is no longer a given.
A new wind of change is blowing across Europe – and the politicians who fail to recognise or engage with the new politics will follow Angela Merkel onto the pages of history.
Her quitting polarised opinion on social media.
Dutch right-winger Geert Wilders claimed Merkel’s open-borders immigration policy was to blame and tweeted: “#Merkel left more than 1 million fortune hunters Europe inside.
In between terrorists, criminals, rapists. Innocent people were victims of its policy.”
Another claimed: “#Migration has polarised Germany’s politics, old school consensualism is on it’s way out – along with Merkel.”
But others mourned her stepping-down as a loss for civilised, humane politics.
One tweeted: #Merkel has been by far the greatest, most courageous and most humane leader of post-world war II #Europe.
She has been #Germany’s moral compass; recognising and pushing against the forces of #fascism, which the opposition to her have rushed to pander to.”