Angela Merkel, the queen of Europe

[AdamSmith]

Angela Merkel, the queen of Europe

As Germany gears up for elections next month, Daniel Johnson explains how a dowdy chemist has fashioned herself into one of the world’s most respected – and influential – politicians

Angela Merkel on the election trail last week. If there is one word to characterise the German Chancellor, it is decency

The Telegraph

9:59PM BST 18 Aug 2013

Angela Merkel is riding high. As she returns from holiday to hit the campaign trail for the German elections – making a swing today through the south-east – she is not only her country’s most popular leader for a generation, but arguably the most respected politician in the world. How has this unflashy East German scientist – who disdains glitz and glamour to the point that when she wears a new dress in public it draws comment – succeeded in scaling the heights of international politics?

There is a mystery about Mrs Merkel: she succeeds by being a woman seemingly without mystery. Unlike the Iron Lady, she rarely uses her feminine qualities to beguile men or impress women. Her natural habitat is not the public platform; she doesn’t tweet or text about anything and everything in the news. Intensely private, she comes across as unpretentious and incorruptible. That is why Silvio Berlusconi, as vain as Mrs Merkel is modest, did not know what to do when they clashed, except to whisper sexist obscenities behind her back.

Next month, on September 22, Germany goes to the polls in what has become virtually a referendum on Mrs Merkel – and she is on course to win a third term of office. Her Christian Democrats are polling at around 40 per cent, twice as much as the Social Democrat opposition. It should be enough to win by a landslide, but under Germany’s proportional representation system, she will still need a coalition partner. The Free Democrats, her present allies, are struggling to cross the 5 per cent threshold to stay in parliament, but Christian Democrats will probably use their second preference votes to keep them in government.

Assuming Mrs Merkel can forge a coalition of some sort, she will boast a record matched by only two of her postwar predecessors: Konrad Adenauer, who restored respect for the Germans, and Helmut Kohl, who reunited them. Though Adenauer created her political creed, Christian Democracy, and Kohl was Mrs Merkel’s mentor, they were both patriarchs in a patriarchal society. Their 59-year-old successor has turned her satirical nickname of “Mutti” (“Mummy”) – she has no children – into a badge of honour. Sensitive to history in a nation understandably suspicious of charismatic leadership, she has cultivated an unthreatening, homely, even dowdy image that delights voters but infuriates her (mainly male) colleagues and opponents. Her style is in some ways more like the Queen’s than Mrs Thatcher’s: she has a no-nonsense manner, but is rarely divisive and never dictatorial.

As her enemies have found, however, she is definitely not to be underestimated. On the world stage, she owes her clout not just to the country she represents – although Ingolstadt, where she speaks at a rally today, is the home of Audi, a potent symbol of Germany’s industrial prowess. Nor is it entirely down to her lacklustre rivals for the leading role, even though Barack Obama’s mishandling of Egypt and Syria has already left him looking like a lame duck, Vladimir Putin seems to relish playing the pantomime villain, and the hapless François Hollande is even more unpopular than his predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy.

No, the truth of the matter is that, if there is one word to characterise Angela Merkel, it is decency. The daughter of a Lutheran pastor, she comes from the tradition that gave us the sacred music of Bach, Handel and Brahms. She stands for a Germany that shoulders its responsibilities as primus inter pares in Europe. On the world stage, she does not carry a big stick – the German military has not covered itself with glory in Afghanistan – but her integrity, intelligence and insight lend her words weight. When Mrs Thatcher spoke, the world listened. So it is with Mrs Merkel.

In an interview last week, for example, she gave notice that the EU might have to “give something back” to nation states. What this might mean was left deliberately vague. But for a German leader, hitherto seen as an arch-federalist, to talk openly about restoring powers to national governments is unprecedented. It suggests that something is finally stirring in the eurozone’s undergrowth.

What brought about this change of heart? David Cameron’s promise of a referendum on British membership was one of the factors. Another, which she explicitly mentioned last week, is the crisis in the Netherlands. Coalitions in Holland come and go but, unlike the British and Germans, the Dutch have yet to see their economy revive. Having had their liberal consensus rent apart by the loss of control over their borders, they have no appetite for “more Europe”. The Germans are keen to keep their neighbours in Holland as allies in their wrangles with the Latins to the south. If the price of Dutch support is a limited repatriation of powers from Brussels, Mrs Merkel will stump up.

The third factor in Mrs Merkel’s calculus is an unfamiliar phenomenon: German Euroscepticism. Up to half of all Germans would ditch the euro and stop bail-outs tomorrow, polls suggest. This tide of opinion has given birth to a new party, Alternative for Germany. Mrs Merkel is determined to crush this upstart – she has noticed the damage that Ukip is doing to the British Conservatives – and her method is to steal its clothes.

The trouble is that Europe is stuck with the euro and all that goes with it. The markets have been calmer since the Germans underwrote the European Central Bank’s promise to do “whatever is necessary” to prevent the continental banking system from collapsing. And some of the invalids are out of intensive care: Greece, for example, claims that it is on course to balance its budget this year, not counting interest and repayments.

Yet the underlying problems of the eurozone have, if anything, become more acute as the gap widens between the Latin mendicants to the south and the Teutonic knights to the north. German exporters have done rather well under the single currency, having accumulated a trillion-dollar surplus with the eurozone, but the German taxpayer has had enough of equally astronomical bail‑outs.

The continuing malaise of the Mediterranean nations has reinforced migration towards the more dynamic economies of Britain and Germany, which is putting pressure on public services and welfare budgets – hence the unaccustomed spectacle of Iain Duncan Smith visiting Berlin recently to make common cause with the Merkel government against the European Commission, which is trying to stop the British refusing migrants easy access to benefits. For Mrs Merkel and Mr Cameron alike, immigration and welfare have risen to the top of the political agenda, with voters poised to punish politicians seen as a soft touch.

Of course, as in Britain, the German Left see things differently. For them, the big issue in this election is cyber-spying, with anti-American conspiracy theories emerging from the Snowden affair and wild comparisons made with the Gestapo and the Stasi. For a few years an internet protest party, the Pirates, briefly captured many of the young with promises of free downloading. But it has now sunk without trace, and Mrs Merkel is trusted to safeguard civil liberties by the great majority of Germans.

Indeed, she was able to showcase not only her respect for individual freedom but her solidarity with the Jewish people, by rushing through a law to permit infant circumcision after a German court criminalised this ancient ritual. Dealing with the Nazi past, in fact, is another area on which she never puts a foot wrong: she is supportive of Israel, though not uncritically so, and insisted on the sale of submarines that have given the Jewish state a powerful new means of defence, especially against Iran.

If Mrs Merkel does win a third term of office next month, she is likely to become Europe’s longest-serving female head of government. As such, she is a role model for women everywhere. Her statesmanship also bears comparison with the two grand old men of German politics, Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl. The latter, her old boss, held office for a record 16 years, and she would quite like to beat him. True, she’s been in office for eight years already, but she still has the energy to keep going – and having recently raised the retirement age to 67, she has plenty of time to reshape Germany, and Europe, before she departs the scene.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/10251271/Angela-Merkel-the-queen-of-Europe.html

[RA1]

Any chance she was born of at least one US parent while they were in Germany and that she would be available in 2016?

How have we sunk to the point that, " Greece claims it is on track to have a balanced budget this year,....not counting interest and repayment of debts" makes any sense?

Best regards,

RA1

[AdamSmith]

Another fascinating portrait of Merkel.

By the extraordinary journalist George Packer. Whom I can report, gratuitously, from a slightly overlapping house tenancy in New Haven long ago, had the most beautiful runner's ass when he was 21.

The Quiet German

The astonishing rise of Angela Merkel, the most powerful woman in the world.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/01/quiet-german?intcid=mod-most-popular

[MsGuy]

How have we sunk to the point that, " Greece claims it is on track to have a balanced budget this year,....not counting interest and repayment of debts" makes any sense?

Exactly my reaction, RA1.

It's called a 'primary budget surplus'. The general idea is that as long as the interest on the debt accrues more slowly than the economy grows, then (eventually) it will be easier to keep up payments on the debt. 'Eventually' is usually measured in decades.

The unmentioned joker in the deck is that the government should 'eventually' be able to select some opportune time to inflate the currency and thereby cancel some largeish chunk of the debt w/o a formal default.

Of course this assumes that the same pols who fucked everything up in the first place are capable of keeping their paws out of the jam jar long enough for all this to work itself out.

[MsGuy]

For a pol, relatively small personal gains almost always outweigh any resulting (even far greater) harm to the larger society. Consider the current mess in Iraq: the new government reports that north of 50,000 ghost soldiers are being carried on the muster rolls of the Army so that officers can pocket their pay.. This when ISIS is making a serious threat to take down the whole fucking lot of them and chop off their heads in the public square! What would any sensible brigade commander do except destroy unit morale to grab a few thousand bucks a month for himself?

The greater the local culture of impunity, the smaller the private gain needs to be. Witness the Mexican mayor who murdered a bus load of college students because the noise they made was disrupting his wife's garden party.

====

My favorite political story of all time is one told in Brazil in the 1960s:

Tourist at the celebration of the opening of a small town's new bridge: "How much did the bridge cost?"

Local: "100 million reals. We all love President Goulart for building it!"

Tourist: "What? No way that bridge cost more than 10 million."

Local: "of course not. Goulart embezzled 90%."

Tourist: Then why do you say you love him?"

Local: Only a fool of a tourist would ask such a stupid question. The last three presidents took the money and didn't build the bridge!"

====

It's no use worrying about pols who do idiots things because it benefits them. That's the nature of the beast.

The only standard to which you can realistically hold them is whether they get the bridge built.

[AdamSmith]

Returning to my own hijack the Googles alas turned up no pics of George Packer's fine young ass but did find this look at him and his lit'ry-minded family...

http://m.sfgate.com/magazine/article/Thicker-Than-Water-3282174.php

[MsGuy]

My spy at the New Yorker tells me Packer posed for this family portrait. That's his wealthy fund manager life partner on the right with current boy toy left.

(I'm proud of myself...tonight it didn't take but two or three minutes see the humor. )

[lookin]

. . . from a slightly overlapping house tenancy in New Haven long ago,

[AdamSmith]

LOLOL

That article on his and his family's pestiferous overachievement reminded me of when we first met. That morning he had flown back from a summer study in Europe, and was already on the phone deciding that evening not to train down to Manhattan to meet Mummy for something at Lincoln Center but rather bicycle (!) from New Haven up to Stratford, CT for an evening of Shakespeare.

Meanwhile I was still dithering whether to slouch over to the tobacconist for a fresh box of Simone Arzt, or instead go straight to supper at Pepe's apizz which was just slightly inconveniently in a different direction.

Note which of us is not currently a staff writer at The New Yorker.

[RA1]

OK, I give up. Who?

Best regards,

RA1

[AdamSmith]

[lookin]

If this is turning into one of those "roads not taken" threads, I'm outta here.

Ooops.

[AdamSmith]

Fret not.

I do hereby solemnly swear (and affirm!) that cycling from New Haven to Stratford is one of those rare things that I did not, do not, and almost certainly never shall regret leaving undone ere 'parting this vale of tears.

That is to say, quite satisfied with the choice made that particular day...

[lookin]

"The only thing I regret about my past is that there's so much of it."

I had thought this was one of Diana Vreeland's but have not been able to reliably pin it on her. If Google doesn't help me soon, I may just appropriate it and let her estate track me down.