With her triumph in the German parliamentary elections on 22 September, Angela Merkel’s popularity has reached new heights. Her bloc — the Christian Democratic Union and its Bavarian sister party — took 41.5% of the vote, just five seats short of an absolute majority and almost 8% more than her share in the 2009 election. But as the Free Democratic Party, her junior coalition partner in the last government, failed to win the required 5% of votes and will no longer be represented in parliament, Merkel must seek a new political partner. A grand coalition with the Social Democrats, who won 25.7% of votes, seems the most likely option. It could be a good one for science as well.

Merkel no doubt owes her victory to Germany’s economic stability and her firm stance on the euro crisis, which has made her the pre-eminent political figure in Europe. Her government has also cut German unemployment by almost 40% since 2005, to 6.8%. And Merkel has benefited from her decision to pull the plug on nuclear energy by 2022 in the wake of the 2011 accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear-power plant in Japan. The cost and technical challenges of the Energiewende, the move to a non-nuclear, low-carbon energy system (see Nature 496, 156–158; 2013), will dominate her third term in office. As will coping with the welfare and health pressures brought about by an ageing population.

A lot of good science will be needed to meet these challenges. Wisely, the government has increased research and technology expenditure by some 60% since 2005 (see Nature 501, 289–290; 2013). Today, Germany’s science landscape is more diverse, more competitive, better funded and less parochial than at any time since the Second World War. Many Max Planck Institutes offer terms and conditions that few other places in the world can match. National research centres, such as the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, are among the leading hubs in their fields, and the model of the Fraunhofer Society, which promotes applied research in conjunction with industry, is now being copied by the United Kingdom. All these organizations, as well as the DFG — Germany’s central grant-giving agency for university research — have benefited from the Pact for Research and Innovation, which has given them generous budget increases over the past few years. Merkel has promised to continue this pact beyond 2015, which would guarantee them budget increases of 5% each year.

“The priority for Merkel should be to strengthen the country’s underfunded universities.”

But not all is rosy. German scientists are at a disadvantage in stem-cell research compared with countries such as Sweden or the United Kingdom. German law prevents the importation or use of any human embryonic stem cells except those created for research before 1 May 2007. The Free Democrats are the only party to have backed more liberal stem-cell rules in the past, and their absence from parliament makes a revision of the law unlikely.

Life could also be better for some plant biologists. Research on genetically modified (GM) crops has all but stopped owing to public hostility and a lack of political support. Since 2005, all experimental releases of GM plants have had to be registered to give their exact location and time of planting. This has allowed opponents to destroy nearly every field trial. As a result, for the first time in 20 years, there were no GM field trials in Germany this year.

The government must rethink its anti-GM policies, which are not supported by any scientifically credible risk assessment. With scientific literacy in the basics of plant breeding and genetics at a low level in Germany, public debate about the field is wide open to quacks and ideologists.

But the first priority for Merkel, as Nature has called for previously, should be to strengthen the country’s relatively underfunded universities. The universities are the responsibility of the country’s 16 states — a funding model that has proved incapable of supporting powerhouses to rival the likes of Harvard or Oxford. The €4.6-billion (US$6.2-billion) Excellence Initiative, jointly funded by central government and the states, has injected some much-needed federal money into the university system. It would take just a two-word constitutional change to allow the government permanently to support state-funded universities — or even to create national research universities similar to Switzerland’s Federal Institutes of Technology. In the past, the second chamber of parliament has blocked such an amendment, but it will find it harder to keep up its resistance if Germany ends up being ruled by a grand coalition.