On Merkel and the future – Jeremy Cliffe in The New Statesman:
‘Over the subsequent 16 years, and her four terms of office, Merkel has guided Germany to greater power and prosperity. She has steered it and Europe through crisis after crisis. In the process she has become, to many around the world, the embodiment of grown-up, pragmatic leadership. Now her long political story, the one that began on that fateful night in November 1989, is ending. Merkel is not seeking a fifth term at the German federal election on 26 September and will step down as chancellor once a new government has been formed. She will leave office not only as one of the most recognisable global politicians but also the most respected: international polling by YouGov last month gave her the most positive ratings of any world leader. She is the pre-eminent European leader of the post-1989 era.
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.’
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‘ Stefan Kornelius, one of her biographers, writes of a press conference in 2012 in which the Bulgarian prime minister was “overwhelmed by what his host had been telling him, in vivid terms, about the nature of the [euro zone] crisis, and told the world: ‘Frau Merkel quite rightly pointed out that the Maya and many other civilisations have disappeared from the face of the earth.’” In a speech to CDU MPs in 2018, she compared the darkening global horizon to the period preceding the Thirty Years’ War (which ravaged what is today Germany) and warned of the complacency that long years of peace can bring.’
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‘ 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.
All of which might appear fatalistic. There is a streak of determinism both in her accounts of the “juggernauts” of history, and in her own background. The essayist Georg Diez observes to me that Merkel grew up in three systems that deal in unyielding forces: religion (as the devout daughter of a Lutheran pastor), science (as a quantum physicist) and historical materialism (as one who spent her first 35 years under an East German political system that promoted a Marxist telling of history). “They all involve rules beyond the scope of human agency,” he ruminates.’
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‘So Merkel is an anti-determinist with a deterministic world-view. The key to her style and instincts as leader lies in how this apparent tension is resolved. For Merkelism means humility towards the forces of history: aware of their presence and might, humbled by the same, but flexible and vigilant for opportunities to harness those forces, and sober about the patience needed to shape them.
In her comments about the Thirty Years’ War she has also stressed the efforts taken to forge the 1648 Peace of Westphalia that ended it: “It took years to find peace”. And it is why she venerates the examples of the postwar founders of the European project: Konrad Adenauer, Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman; why she talks about applying the lessons of history; why she ran for her fourth and final term in 2017 rather than stepping down (persuaded to do so by the election of Donald Trump and the perceived need for someone to hold the system together). There is in this humble-not-fatalistic posture, the historian Timothy Garton Ash tells me, something of Bismarck’s dictum: “The statesman’s task is to hear God’s footsteps marching through history, and to try and catch on to his coat-tails as he marches past.”’
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‘Watching Merkel in her seat in the semicircular Bundestag chamber, under Norman Foster’s glass dome, you will soon notice that she is busy with her mobile phone much of the time. If the surroundings – the constant reminders of past chaos and trauma, of the fragility and transience of human order – speak to her realist philosophy of history, then the image of the chancellor performing the Blackberry prayer, tapping away with her head bowed, while other politicians orate from the podium some ten metres away stands as a useful symbol of the well-honed political method that she has enacted as chancellor.
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.
The second element of her method is to eschew visions or grand strategy in favour of tactical movements, or as she calls it, “driving by sight”. That means few sweeping proclamations and lots of text exchanges – the nervous system of her power networks, with political intelligence pinging in and her instructions and questions pinging out. Recipients of messages signed “AM” are typically her advisers or a shifting constellation of contingent allies and partners. Other than inner-circle members such as Merkel’s office manager Beate Baumann or her press adviser Eva Christiansen, Merkel’s day-by-day approach has seen her cultivate few permanent allies, with influential ministers, MPs, advisers, and even fellow world leaders drifting in and out of favour.
The third element is patience. The outgoing chancellor prefers to let events unfold; accumulating information, monitoring the mood in her party, maintaining room for manoeuvre and committing to a course only when forced to do so. Mocked as merkeln (“to Merkel”), this practice is in Merkel’s own analysis a source of her power and longevity: “I’m a person who gives time to time.” It has been a hallmark of her crisis management. In the eurozone crisis she repeatedly resisted until the last moment before agreeing new bailout packages for Greece; in 2015 she decreed that the borders should remain open to migrants only as crowds of them were trudging along Hungarian motorways towards Germany.
Ideologically, strategically and managerially, Merkel travels light. That is an expression of her cautious personality, but also of a leadership style defined by humility before the events of history.’
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‘There is an important distinction in German politics between gestalten (to mould or shape) and verwalten (to administer or steward). After 16 years where the priority was to forge something new, the task for Merkel when she came to office in 2005 was to consolidate all that change. She was the leader for that moment: a soothing verwalter rather than a strident gestalter. To the extent that she has reformed the country over the subsequent 16 years, it has largely been to complete the Schröder-Fischer project.
Schröder and Fischer had started to shift German society in a more modern, open direction: extending maternity and paternity leave, introducing civil partnerships, reforming the citizenship law to naturalise millions of migrants without German roots. Merkel’s governments further extended parental rights and childcare, legalised gay marriage and, by embracing a large influx of migrants in 2015, opened the door to a possible future for Germany as a Migrationsland (migration country), a notion that would have been unthinkable in the 1990s.
Schröder and Fischer had started to phase out nuclear power; Merkel fast-tracked that process in 2011. The Kosovo intervention in 1999 enabled a more normalised role for German power in the world, with Merkel presiding over troop deployments in Afghanistan and the Sahel, German military leadership of Nato’s “enhanced forward presence” in Lithuania, and a creeping German acceptance of more geopolitical responsibility.
The SPD-Green coalition had pushed through the reforms that made Germany competitive again; Merkel deserves at least some credit for not derailing its achievements and for tackling some of its social side effects by, for example, introducing a minimum wage in 2015. Admittedly, many of these advances were primarily the work of SPD ministers in her governments (it has been junior coalition partner for 12 of her 16 years), but they nonetheless belong to her legacy as chancellor.’
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‘Huge power resides in the office of Germany’s federal chancellor. Adenauer, the first to hold it, established this fact by shaping the country forged from the Western zones of occupation in 1949 in his own image: as Christian, anchored in the West, and culturally and politically centred on his native Rhineland. He did so to a degree that grappled with and moulded history and events, rather than deferring to them. It is in the gift of the chancellor to shape debates and set a course, but Merkel did so far too sparingly. “She evolved as a very pragmatic crisis manager,” says Cathryn Clüver Ashbrook, director of the German Council on Foreign Relations: “but not as somebody with a strategic vision for the country.” “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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‘Part of that negative legacy is the present weakness in the CDU. The outgoing chancellor’s habit of eschewing allies in favour of contingent partnerships leaves the party hollowed out, devoid of vision and endowed with remarkably few strong federal politicians. That Armin Laschet, the CDU/CSU candidate in the upcoming election, has tanked in the polls is a reminder of how impressive Merkel’s four consecutive election wins were. But Laschet’s struggle is also a product of her style of leadership. The party, said Georg Diez, has a “time gap” of about ten years to close, following a decade of missed opportunities to rethink Christian democracy for the 2020s.’
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‘Merkel has been a strange chancellor, an inscrutable “other” in her own party, in German politics and among other world leaders. That very otherness is inseparable from her vision of history and her distinctive political method. It is responsible for the mixed record of her chancellorship: of stability coming at the cost of stasis; prosperity at the cost of complacency; maturity at the cost of passivity; continuity at the cost of unfinished business; and welcome decency at the cost of anything approaching the greatness of an Adenauer. Yet precisely this otherness, precisely the complexity of a record neither overwhelmingly positive nor overwhelmingly negative, demands a certain Merkelian humility before history itself. “It’s too soon to tell,” says Garton Ash of her longue durée meaning. “If later governments make up for the things left undone then she will go down as a good chancellor, if not she will be held responsible.” Merkel governed as a chancellor aware of history and one whose leadership was defined by historical circumstances. She leaves office popular and as a rare world leader who has given up power at a time entirely of her choosing. That is a notable achievement.’
Read the article here.
This is a good article, but I’m not as much in awe with it as some others.
The most surprising part of the article is the credit that Cliffe gives to the Schröder-Fischer government, Schröder is immensely unpopular (thanks also to his close relationship with Putin) and Fischer faded slowly away. Maybe Cliffe has a point.
Then the greatness of Adenauer. Yes, Adenauer made some important decisions (Westbindung) and he was instrumental in turning Western-Germany into a solid democracy, but he also largely kept the old elite that functioned well in the Third Reich in place. In hindsight this was probably a good decision, or at least an unavoidable decision, but I would say that it was more pragmatism than vision. Adenauer was driving by sight as well.
Whether Laschet’s fairly poor ratings can be explained by Merkel hollowing the party out is less convincing to me. I’m not even convinced that Laschet is a bad choice as successor for Merkel.
For some reasons Scholz is seen by quite a few as the most convincing continuation of Merkel with other means. Maybe also because of the flooding this summer.
And it’s possible that this will lead to a so-called traffic light coalition, SPD, Greens and the Free-Democrats, although I’m not sure that the Free-Democrats are eager to join such a coalition.
This article emphasizes, as many other articles about her, the basic decency of Merkel, her prudence, her conviction that great gestures are often empty gestures and the willingness to stand up for certain values.
Cliffe stated that she was unwilling to challenge the German voters, but I’d say that when it was really needed, she did just that. She might have missed some opportunities, but less so than many other politicians.