Visions of the German chancellor as the only person standing between humanity and the apocalypse became fashionable after U.S. President Donald Trump’s election to the White House. But they were always overblown. Merkel herself knows that Germany — with its poorly-equipped military, deeply ingrained pacifism and historical hang-ups — is in no position to defend the West.[...]
But now Germany, too, has become more politically unstable, with the rise of the far right populist Alternative for Deutschland and support for the two establishment parties of the post-war order — Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union and the Social Democrats — collapsing.[...]
But Merkel is also the victim of larger social forces sweeping the West, which have led to the collapse of the political center she bloodlessly embodied. Given Germany’s history and taboos, the sort of mass, nationalist political movements present in most other Western countries had eluded it since the end of World War II. That special dispensation, regretfully, is now over. In this sense, Germany is becoming more “normal.”
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