Yet Merkel is also fiendishly hard to define. She is a Protestant woman scientist from the former East Germany in a political family (the CDU and its Bavarian ally the Christian Social Union or CSU) dominated by male Catholic lawyers from West Germany. She has been hailed as a progressive icon and defender of liberal democracy, yet is also a paragon of small-c conservatism and has been frustratingly reluctant to stand up to autocracy. She is a global power broker in an age of swaggering strongmen, yet is unflashy in her personality and habits; she lives in a modest flat and can be seen doing her own grocery shopping in a central Berlin supermarket. She has called multiculturalism “a grand delusion” yet is perhaps best known for admitting one million mostly Middle Eastern migrants at the peak of the migration crisis in 2015. She is profoundly interested in history yet travels light, ideologically and strategically, in her own style of leadership. [...]
Merkel is also fascinated by the 19th century and how a seemingly sophisticated world collapsed into the carnage of the First World War. The 60th birthday lecture was delivered by Jürgen Osterhammel, author of The Transformation of the World (2009), a history of that first age of globalisation and the uncontrollable, disruptive effects it unleashed. In 2018 she urged her ministers to read The Sleepwalkers (2012), Christopher Clark’s account of what Merkel herself called “the violent juggernaut of 1914”. “I am afraid that open societies in the post-Cold War world are more in danger than we realise,” she once said. [...]
That method has three main elements. The first is strategic inoffensiveness. Though wryly funny in private (her impressions of other world leaders are the stuff of Berlin political legend), Merkel’s public demeanour is usually bland to a fault. Where others lead from the podium, with soaring rhetoric and sharp dividing lines, her hedged and vague use of language can verge on the anaesthetic. Critics have called this “asymmetrical demobilisation”, the practice of diffusing conflicts and denying opponents substantial grievances with which to mobilise their voters. Merkel herself has acknowledged the advantages of avoiding drama (“in calmness lies power” is one of her mantras) and has achieved a sort of apolitical status. “She’s a bit like the Queen of England,” says Khuê Pham, an essayist for Die Zeit newspaper: “Her political style is ‘you know me, you can trust that I am going to do the right thing’, not a discussion about what she wants to do.” [...]
“Her biggest single historical failure was the eurozone crisis in 2010,” says Garton Ash. “She had the chance to convince Germans of the case to make the eurozone fit for the 21st century, but she did not use it. It was one of those moments where the chancellor has an extraordinary power to lead and she missed that chance and let the narrative of the idle, corrupt south preying on the virtuous north become established in German public opinion and politics. It took ten years and a pandemic to overcome that.” When bailouts became imperative to pull the eurozone back from the brink she presented them not so much as desirable but merely alternativlos (“without alternative”), a term with which she has become associated.
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