MICHAEL BARONE: Angela Merkel and Davos rebuked in Germany.

It’s been a tough era for Davos Man, the personification of the great and the good who meet in the World Economic Forum in that Swiss ski resort every January. The rebukes just keep coming: the Euro crisis, Brexit, Trump, and now, and once again unexpectedly, Angela Merkel’s failure to form a German government.

For a dozen years, European elites who have recoiled from former President George W. Bush and swooned over former President Barack Obama have regarded Merkel as a rock-solid firmament of good sense. Her considerable internal political skills, her seeming unflappability, her upholding of conventional wisdoms, both well- and ill-founded, have made her a favorite at Davos.

Merkel has been the pillar of the European Union and seems to have been the dominant force behind the multiple responses to each in a succession of euro crises. It helps, of course, that Germany has Europe’s largest economy, one mostly unscathed by the 2008 financial crisis — though that owes much to the Thatcherish labor law reforms of Merkel’s predecessor, the Social Democrat Gerhard Schroeder.

By standard political science rules of thumb, Merkel and others in the Christian Democratic Union, or CDU, should have been a big winner in the Sept. 24 elections. The national unemployment rate is 3.7 percent. Inflation, the bugaboo of Germans since the 1920s, is low. The Social Democrats’ leader is untested in national politics.

Yet the CDU and its Bavarian partner the Christian Social Union, or CSU, got only 33 percent of the vote — their lowest percentage since West Germany started voting in 1949. The Social Democratic Party for Germany, or SPD, arguably the world’s oldest social democratic party, plummeted to 21 percent. The two major parties thus barely topped 50 percent, compared to the high 60s in 2005-13 and 76 to 77 percent in 1992-2002.

This, like Brexit in Britain and Donald Trump’s victory in the United States, was a slap in the face of the political, media, and business establishment.

Maybe the establishment would get slapped less if it were less awful.