Angela Merkel's Model For Germany and Its Limits - Foreign Affairs

4/22/2021 Angela Merkel's Model for Germany and its Limits | Foreign Affairs
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e Singular Chancellor
e Merkel Model and Its Limits
By Constanze Stelzenmüller May/June 2021
German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin, March 2021

Clemens Bilan / Reuters
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Y
ears ago, at the Munich Security Conference, I found myself squeezed in on the steps of the grand staircase
of a hotel ballroom, trying, dutifully but vainly, to follow a more than usually humdrum speech by Germany’s
rst female chancellor. Tuning out, I recognized the one-star general hunkered down beside me, a senior
sta er in the chancellery. I tapped his sleeve and said, “So what’s it like to work for her?” He turned to me and
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And how it ran. Angela Merkel is now in the nal months of her fourth term in o ce, her last, which is set to end
with national elections on September 26. Only Helmut Kohl, the chancellor who oversaw the joining of East and
West Germany in 1990, held o ce for longer. A Pew poll last year showed Merkel to be the world’s most trusted
leader. Forbes magazine has ranked her the world’s most powerful woman for ten years in a row. In 2009, the toy
company Mattel even created an Angela Merkel Barbie doll. For a while, some U.S. and British commentators,
dismayed by their own leaders, even took to calling her “the leader of the free world” (a title the chancellor is said to
detest).
Yet at the same time, Merkel’s opacity and technocratic prudence have frustrated and often infuriated those who
wanted Germany to articulate a clearer vision of its role in a liberal world order, to take on greater responsibility for
defending and shaping that order—or just to acknowledge and mitigate the impact of the country’s decisions on its
neighbors and allies. And although the 66-year-old conservative remains her country’s best-liked politician, public
approval of her government has dipped sharply as frustration with its haphazard pandemic management has grown.
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e looming end of the Merkel era thus raises questions that should hold important lessons—not least for those who
are currently seeking to succeed her. Just what was her recipe for power, and is it replicable? Has her tenure made
Germany, its neighbors, and its allies better o ? And has she prepared her country for the future?
MERKEL’S METHOD
At the beginning of her career, nothing would have seemed less plausible than that Merkel would become Germany’s
eighth chancellor, the successor to a line of hard-drinking, smoking, womanizing, and generally scenery-chewing Big
Men of West German politics. When the Berlin Wall came down, in 1989, Merkel was a divorced 35-year-old
quantum chemist working at an academic research institute in East Berlin. She had just joined the Christian
Democratic Union (CDU), when she was picked by Kohl for the most patronizing job in the chancellor’s rst post-
reuni cation cabinet: minister for women and youth. She was as unmemorable there as she was in her next job,
minister for the environment. Kohl, busy burnishing his legacy and weeding out rivals, referred to her as “das
Mädchen” (“that girl”).
But when Kohl found himself embroiled in a party nancing scandal in 1999, it was Merkel, and not one of the half-
dozen young conservatives circling the old man,
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audacious patricide led to her election as head of the party. Six years later, in 2005, she became the rst East German,
and the rst woman, to be elected chancellor.
Since then, Merkel has weathered a punishing series of domestic and external upheavals, including the 2008 nancial
crisis and the ensuing eurozone meltdown, Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and invasion of Ukraine, the 2015
refugee crisis, the subsequent meteoric rise of the far-right party Alternative for Germany, and now the COVID-19
pandemic. She has been in power longer than any of her peers in the major industrialized countries, with the sole
exception of Vladimir Putin. is has enabled her to broker countless compromises at EU, G-7, and G-20 summits,
as well as to hold together four coalition governments at home (three with the center-left Social Democrats and one
with the pro-business Free Democrats). She has outmaneuvered authoritarian leaders, allies, coalition partners, and
party frenemies. When necessary, she has plowed through illness, exhaustion, and even a pelvic fracture, su ered while
cross-country skiing in Switzerland.
Yet outwardly, the most striking thing about the chancellor remains her determined normalcy. Merkel’s clear, light
voice carries the unhurried intonation of the pine-forested, sandy-soiled Brandenburg countryside northwest of
Berlin, where her father was a Lutheran parson. Her working uniform consists of sensible ats, black pants, and an
endless supply of hip-length jackets in every color. e chancellor and her husband, a retired chemistry professor, live
in their old Berlin apartment rather than the o cial residence; the only visible security is a police o cer in front of
the building. To the approval of Berliners, Merkel is sometimes seen walking in the city center or shopping in a
supermarket, trailed by her bodyguards.
What really makes Merkel stand out from her peers is her ability to hold on to power against all odds.
Arguably, Merkel’s unpretentiousness is itself a calculated expression of power. One German described her to me as a
walking force eld: “In conversation, you know you’re being subjected to a quiet, all-encompassing scrutiny, all the
time.” Another person remembers a meeting Merkel had with then U.S. Vice President Joe Biden in Berlin in 2013.
e chancellor waved away his attempts to charm her and pursued her agenda points until she was satis ed that she
had nailed down what she needed to know. en she canceled her next appointment to continue the conversation.
“He ended up telling her about looking into the Russian president’s eyes and saying, ‘I can look into your soul, and I
don’t like it,’ which she countered with an absolutely spot-on impression of Putin.”
Merkel’s work ethic is as legendary as her wicked sense of humor, her command of her briefs, and her appetite for
information and arguments. An American who witnessed some of her phone conversations with U.S. President
Barack Obama told me that “they sounded like a graduate seminar.” Her ministers fear her ferociously retentive
memory for the details of their portfolios—including the particulars of complex technical and scienti c issues, such as
trade, digital technology, and, lately, the pandemic. But what really makes Merkel stand out from her peers is her
ability to hold on to power against all odds.
One of the most distinctive features of her method

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when she wants to. When a talk-show host once portentously asked her what qualities she associated with Germany,
Merkel dryly answered, “Well-sealed windows.” But her default delivery mode is what Germans now call merkeln: so
deadpan and convoluted that it’s impossible to pin her down. Behind the style, however, is what German strategists
have called “asymmetric demobilization”: dull the issues, depoliticize con icts, and thus keep the opponent’s voters
from going to the polls. is approach has enabled Merkel to modernize her conservative party, dragging it into the
political center, pushing her Social Democratic and Free Democratic coalition partners to the sidelines, and co-opting
elements of their platforms, such as tax bene ts for parents or a statutory minimum wage.
A second key aspect of the way Merkel manages power is that she devolves responsibility but tightly limits trust. e
chancellor’s innermost circle consists of a very small team of loyalists with whom she has worked for years (in some
cases decades) and in whose discretion and discipline she can place absolute con dence. Everyone else, from cabinet
members to party functionaries, is kept on a long leash. Success is rewarded with approval and credit. But those who
trip or entangle themselves either come to heel with a newly sober understanding of their options or suddenly
discover life outside politics.
Merkel’s decision not to close Germany’s borders to a huge wave of refugees was an act of humanism.
e third element of the Merkel method is assiduously gauging and responding to her base’s mood. She rst nailed
her national leadership ambitions to the mast with a aming liberal economic reformist speech at a party convention
in 2003. When it became clear that this was too much change for the delegates and might cost her the
chancellorship, she backtracked swiftly, dropping old party allies. A few years ago, Der Spiegel disclosed that her
chancellery was commissioning, on average, three surveys a week. Her two most daring choices—deciding to
decommission Germany’s nuclear power plants within a decade after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster and
refusing in 2015 to close Germany’s borders to one million mainly Middle Eastern refugees—were fully supported by
polling.
Merkel has twice sailed against the political winds. During the 2008 nancial crisis, surveys showed that Germans
were strictly against bailouts for EU member states. But she steadfastly opposed her party and public opinion by
pushing through the rescue packages and insisting that Greece stay in the eurozone. e refugee decision, for its part,
became controversial, and led to the rise of the far right. In 2015, Fiona Hill, a colleague of mine at the Brookings
Institution, asked about the decision in a conversation with former Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers, who had
known the chancellor through European Christian democratic circles since her earliest days in politics. Lubbers
predicted that Merkel would stand her ground despite the backlash; for the steadfast Lutheran, he said, this was “a
matter of deep moral conviction.”
Merkel’s interpreters have labored heroically to reconcile these paradoxes. e simple truth is that Merkel the level-
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convictions. Few of her peers have been able to accumulate so much political capital. Yet even her admirers concede
that although she has been exquisitely adroit at riding out the currents of politics, she has been far too reluctant to
shape them.
AN AMBIVALENT LEGACY
With Germany’s election drawing closer, what has become of all that political capital? What will Merkel’s legacy be
—and will she deserve to be called a great chancellor?
ree of Germany’s eight postwar chancellors deserve that title. Konrad Adenauer’s claim to greatness was
Westbindung—anchoring the young West German republic in the transatlantic alliance by joining NATO and
reconciling with France and Israel. Willy Brandt’s enduring legacy was Ostpolitik: asking forgiveness from Eastern
Europe, falling to his knees in the Warsaw ghetto, and seeking détente with the Soviet Union. Helmut Kohl steered
the two Germanies to reuni cation and gave up the deutsche mark for the sake of a common currency, the euro,
rooting the reuni ed country in an enlarging EU.
Merkel unquestionably transformed Germany’s post–Cold War politics, liberalized her party, presided over an
extraordinary expansion of German economic and political power in Europe, and did much to defend the European
political project. And yet her claims to greatness are inconclusive, perhaps because so many of the signi cant
achievements of her tenure have come with a darker underside.
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Merkel era saw Germany’s economy roar back from a deep malaise to become
the world’s fourth largest, with sharply rising living standards, near-full employment, and historic government budget
surpluses. Her economic policies were notably business-friendly, but they failed to push for urgently required
technological adaptation in key industries or the modernization of physical and digital infrastructure. A series of
scandals—from the car industry’s manipulation of emission data (“Dieselgate”) to the fraudulent insolvency of the
payment processor Wirecard—have revealed a deeply awed corporate culture and a resistance to accountability and
oversight. is makes the German economy highly vulnerable to illicit nancial ows, a favorite tool of organized
crime, extremists, and authoritarian adversaries.
Merkel made an early bid for the title of “climate chancellor” with her strong advocacy of progressive global climate
policies. But her domestic climate policies have become embroiled in the many contradictions of her energy policy:
her swerve away from nuclear power in 2011 only intensi ed Germany’s dependence on coal, and despite spending a
fortune on subsidies for renewables, the country has had trouble meeting its international emission targets.
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A coal-fired power station near Cottbus, Germany, December 2009

Pawel Kopczynski / Reuters
Merkel’s record on Europe is even more complicated. Southern European countries resented the austerity policies
imposed from Berlin during the eurozone crisis and blamed them for the rise of populists in Athens and Rome; in
contrast, some frugal northern European and Baltic countries were demanding that Greece be thrown out of the
eurozone in the wake of its debt crisis. Eastern Europeans were angry at her for welcoming refugees and refused to
participate in an EU-wide resettlement system. Liberals across the continent have accused her of turning a blind eye
to democratic backsliding in Poland and full-blown authoritarianism in Hungary. A succession of British prime
ministers, from David Cameron to Boris Johnson, have been dismayed by Merkel’s polite refusal to pay any price to
stop them from divorcing the EU. French President Emmanuel Macron was keenly disappointed to nd her
unimpressed by his grand ideas for deeper European integration.
Yet on many occasions, Merkel has quietly and patiently bridged deep European divides. She fought against a no-deal
Brexit. Her move to support the EU’s $826 billion pandemic recovery fund in May 2020 by allowing the bloc to raise
common debt in capital markets for the rst time—an option ercely resisted by her party for decades—very likely
prevented a disintegration of the union.
Merkel’s decision not to close Germany’s borders to a huge wave of refugees in 2015—“We can do it,” she famously
explained—was an act of humanism. Become
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because it took huge pressure o smaller European neighbors and the Balkan countries, where the refugees had rst ×
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arrived. Most of those who stayed in Germany have by now integrated successfully into society, replenishing a
workforce that has been clamoring for new labor.
Nevertheless, the domestic and external costs were immense. German cities and states struggled to cope with the
in ux for months, and citizens felt that the government was asking them to take on too much responsibility for
helping the newcomers. Germany’s neighbors objected that Merkel’s decision had created an enormous incentive for
additional migration. It took a tawdry multibillion-euro deal with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to stop
the ow by keeping migrants in Turkey; and indeed, Germany ended up de facto closing its borders to refugees.
Nothing has been quite as excruciating for Merkel as having to deal with a hostile United States under
Trump.
Worst of all, the crisis fueled ethnonationalist movements across Europe. In Germany, it turned the Alternative for
Germany from a small Euroskeptical party into a raging far-right, xenophobic force that entered the national
legislature and became leader of the opposition in a mere four years. Rebellion was rife in the CDU, and Merkel was
never closer to losing her job. She won reelection in 2017 with her party’s worst postwar result (33 percent of the
popular vote), and she had to negotiate for an unprecedented ve months to form a government.
Charting Germany’s shifting relations with the great powers has been Merkel’s most vexatious challenge of all. As a
European middle power that shares a continent with and imports energy from Russia, depends for exports on China
(Germany’s biggest trading partner outside the EU), and relies on the United States for its security umbrella,
Germany has limited strategic options. Historically, this has been re ected in a deeply ingrained instinct to balance
allies and adversaries alike, and Merkel has been no exception to this tradition.
Indeed, a decade ago, Berlin saw Moscow and Beijing as strategic partners in what it hoped would become a two-way
bargain: Germany would help them transform not just their economies but also their political systems. is made for
roaring business. e Ost-Ausschuss, Germany’s chief lobbying association for companies doing business in Russia,
was a powerful player in trade policy. So many German CEOs wanted to join the chancellor’s annual trips to China
that sometimes three planes were required for the entire delegation. (Merkel would also make sure to meet with
Chinese and Russian dissidents at the German embassy, and she received the Dalai Lama in Berlin in 2007.) Today,
however, a revisionist Russia and a rising China are playing o ense as strategic competitors to the West, not just in
their own “near abroads,” and in the Middle East and Africa, but also within Europe’s—and Germany’s—physical
and digital borders.
Russia’s annexation of Crimea, its ongoing proxy war in Ukraine, its disinformation and propaganda operations in
German social media, the 2015 hack of the Bundestag servers, the 2019 murder of a Chechen political refugee in
Berlin, the 2020 attempted murder of the Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny, and Moscow’s support for
the brutal crackdowns on mass demonstrations in Belarus—all these developments have led the German political
×
class to make a bleak reassessment of the relationship with Moscow.
Subscribe Now. Merkel has sharply condemned the Kremlin for
the assassination attempt against Navalny and had him brought to Berlin for treatment, and she has backed new EU
sanctions against senior Russians in response. Yet she has refused—despite massive pressure from the Trump and
Biden administrations—to wield the biggest stick in her arsenal and suspend the Gazprom pipeline project Nord
Stream 2, which is intended to bring Russian natural gas to Germany, circumventing Ukrainian and Polish transit
routes.
Russian military vehicles off the coast of Sevastapol, Crimea, July 2017
Pavel Rebrov / Reuters
Similarly, China’s ruthless authoritarianism under President Xi Jinping, persecution of the Uyghurs and of activists,
drive for regional hegemony, crackdown on Hong Kong, threats toward Taiwan, and confrontational diplomacy in
Europe have also hardened attitudes in Berlin. Owing to cybersecurity concerns, the German government is planning
new restrictions on telecommunications providers that would e ectively bar the Chinese company Huawei from the
country’s 5G network. In September 2020, China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, got an unusual public scolding in
Berlin from his host and German counterpart, Heiko Maas, who told him, “We o er our international partners
respect, and we expect the exact same from them.” Growing numbers of representatives in the Bundestag have
demanded a tougher line on China. Yet when Germany held the rotating EU presidency in the second half of 2020,
Merkel pushed through a Chinese-EU investment agreement despite loud concern on both sides of the Atlantic.
Nothing, however, has been quite as excruciating for Merkel

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President Donald Trump. As a young woman in East Germany, she dreamed of traveling to America; in 1993, she ×
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spent four weeks touring California with the man who would become her second husband. As chancellor, she became
a dedicated transatlanticist, even defending President George W. Bush’s war in Iraq. Obama appeared to her to be a
lightweight at rst, but she grew genuinely close to him; it was Obama who urged her to run for a fourth term
because of the risk to Europe from Trump. Trump turned out to harbor a relentless animosity toward the EU,
Germany, and the chancellor. In May 2017, after Trump’s rst appearance at a G-7 summit, Merkel told a campaign
audience in a Bavarian beer tent, “ e era in which we could fully rely on others is over to some extent.”
Merkel welcomed Biden’s election with warmth (and palpable relief ). Her defense minister, Annegret Kramp-
Karrenbauer, who shares her views on the importance of the alliance with the United States, keeps pushing for
greater defense spending and a more forward-leaning German military posture. But it is also true that Germany’s
security capabilities have been woefully underfunded for far too long. Like Merkel’s dithering over standing up to
Moscow and Beijing, German military weakness has undercut the security of Europe and NATO.
UNDERPREPARED
e darkening geopolitical landscape and the menace of the extreme right appear to have unleashed something in
Merkel. According to a Der Spiegel story, she spoke to her party’s parliamentary group in 2018 about the bloody wars
of religion that followed the Reformation. e ensuing more than six decades of peace, Merkel said, lulled Europeans
into a false sense of security, making them unprepared for what came next: the irty Years’ War (1618–48), which
killed up to a third of the population in some parts of German lands. To reinforce the message, she added, “More
than 70 years have also passed since the end of World War II.”
When the pandemic began, Merkel was one of the rst leaders to grasp that it could become a modern-day version of
these early catastrophes. On March 18, 2020, the chancellor told a stunned nation in a televised address: “ is is
serious. You should take it seriously, too. Since German uni cation—no, since World War II—there has been no
challenge like this one, where our common solidarity matters so much.” At rst, it seemed as though her country had
heeded her; in the spring and summer, German policymakers acted swiftly, decisively, and in unison. While the virus
raged elsewhere, caseloads in Germany stayed low, and the country began to reopen. Germany—and Merkel—was
being hailed as a shining example of leadership.
But now it appears that Merkel the scientist, crisis manager, and compromise broker is facing her greatest failure at
home. Warnings (including hers) of a second pandemic wave were ignored. e result was a horri c winter spike; as
of March 2021, the national death toll exceeded 70,000. e wealthy, well-ordered Germany that took on the task of
integrating one million refugees in 2015 is now struggling to deliver tests and vaccines.
ere are many causes for this chaos. Health policy is the business of Germany’s 16 states. In a parliamentary system,
the chancellor does not have a veto over policies that are state prerogatives; all she can do is persuade. In a year with
six regional votes besides the nationalBecome
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health administration is overregulated and underorganized—a fact made all the more ironic by the fact that one
internationally successful vaccine, P zer-BioNTech’s, was co-developed by German scientists of Turkish origin.
Merkel seems increasingly frustrated and depleted, her endless patience eroded.
Even Germany’s friends would add that the country’s internal political debates can display a complacency that seems
disconcertingly at odds with its current challenges and vulnerability. ey are not reassured by the fact that only
months ahead of the national vote, the question of who could be Germany’s next chancellor remains wide open.
Opinion surveys still suggest that the likeliest next German government will be led by a conservative chancellor, with
the Greens as junior coalition partners. But a recent slump in the fortunes of Merkel’s CDU does not bode well for
its chances in September. Her chosen political heir, Kramp-Karrenbauer, resigned as party leader after only a year. e
new party leader, Armin Laschet, the premier of Germany’s most populous state, North Rhine–Westphalia, has put in
a lackluster performance. In mid-March, the CDU su ered its worst-ever defeats in two bellwether regional
elections. e country’s febrile and angry political mood has been exacerbated by revelations that several conservative
legislators pro ted from corrupt deals to procure face masks.
So far, none of this seems to have given the far right, paralyzed by in ghting and the threat of observation by the
domestic intelligence service, the boost it yearns for. But Laschet may yet nd himself elbowed aside by Markus
Söder, the Bavarian premier and leader of the CDU’s local sister party, the Christian Social Union. Some are even
speculating about the possibility in the fall of a center-left coalition of the Social Democrats, the Free Democrats, and
the Greens—a “tra c light coalition,” so called for the parties’ colors—with the CDU in opposition.
Merkel, meanwhile, seems increasingly frustrated and depleted, her endless patience eroded, her legendary
negotiating energy spent. Germans may someday come to appreciate that Merkel was singularly lacking in the
character aws of her three great predecessors, Adenauer, Brandt, and Kohl, each of whom left o ce under a shadow
and against his will. Her integrity and dedication are beyond question—and she will be the rst of Germany’s heads
of government to relinquish power of her own accord. Nonetheless, and despite her considerable achievements, the
ultimate responsibility for the state of the country, and its relations with its allies and adversaries, lies with the
chancellor.
As Germany ponders whom to elect as her successor, it might heed a lesson from the 2011 Fukushima disaster. In the
aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami that led to the world’s worst nuclear power accident since Chernobyl, it
became clear that studies about the vulnerability of the plant’s architecture had been ignored. In other words, disaster
might, with proper planning and action, have been averted or mitigated. Modern democracies, too, face a future of
increasing crises and upheavals. Germany’s current state is an object lesson in the dangers of failing to prepare for and
protect oneself, one’s neighbors, and one’s allies against the next disruption.
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CONSTANZE STELZENMÜLLER is Fritz Stern Chair on Germany and Trans-Atlantic Relations and a Senior Fellow at the
Brookings Institution’s Center on the United States and Europe.
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4/22/2021 Angela Merkel's Model for Germany and its Limits | Foreign Affairs

German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin, March 2021

One of the most distinctive features of her method

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A coal-fired power station near Cottbus, Germany, December 2009

Nothing, however, has been quite as excruciating for Merkel

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