Angela Merkel A Pair of Safe Hands
Perceptions of Germany’s chancellor, who is likely to win re-election on September 22nd, are completely different at home and abroad
This billboard in Berlin features only 3 letters along with those iconic hands, clearly supporting Merkel's CDU Party.
Asked about it, she replies, in a disarming and characteristic deadpan, that she adopted the position to solve a practical problem, as any trained scientist would (she earned her PhD with a dissertation on quantum chemistry). The problem was what to do with those hands. The solution was to neutralise them against each other, which happens to be pleasingly symmetrical and also pushes the shoulders up, improving posture.
The explanation is pure Merkel—unpretentious, pragmatic, artfully plain. With a similarly choreographed candour she has let it be known that she likes to cook potato soup for her husband (a scientist who otherwise stays out of public view). She does her own shopping, occasionally getting lost in the supermarket aisles. Mrs Merkel “fits the cliché that we Germans have of ourselves: frugal, sombre, awkward and a bit unpolished in a likeable way,” says Ralph Bollmann, author of one of a ream of biographies published this year. That common touch, he thinks, is why the Germans identify so much with their chancellor that in the past few years they have started to call her Mutti—“Mum”.
The rhombus makes for a striking poster. As telling, though, is what the huge poster lacks. There is only one tiny bit of text: the initials CDU, tucked in the corner. They stand for the Christian Democratic Union, the centre-right party that Mrs Merkel leads, a big tent of churchgoers, conservatives and free-market liberals. Parties and platforms, not personalities, are supposed to play the lead role in German parliamentary elections. But this time, for the CDU, Mrs Merkel’s person is the platform.
What is that platform’s content? Outside Germany, Mrs Merkel is identified above all with a particular stance in the euro crisis, one which says it can only be solved with “austerity” (meaning brutal budget cuts) on the part of formerly profligate governments and wider economic reforms to make the entire euro zone competitive again. This explains the cheeky banners Irish football fans held up during last year’s European championship: “Angela Merkel thinks we’re at work”. It also accounts for the odious posters of Mrs Merkel defaced with a Hitler moustache brandished by demonstrators in Greece.
Ganz, Schön, Lustig
Germans see things differently. Mrs Merkel has achieved close to
nothing of what she promised in previous election manifestos. There has
been no overall tax simplification, for example, only a few giveaways to
special interests. She has undertaken no big reform—the last one,
liberalising Germany’s labour market, occurred a decade ago under her
predecessor, Gerhard Schröder. Where she has made bold domestic changes,
above all in deciding to give up nuclear power after the 2011 disaster
at Fukushima in Japan, she has been adopting policies already favoured
by the opposition parties. To Germans, therefore, Mrs Merkel is the
opposite of ideological. She is a caregiver, like a Mutti, not a taskmaster, like her Irish or Greek caricatures.By temperament, Mrs Merkel tries to slow political processes down. She also tries to break down problems into discrete units, observing and testing each solution separately before moving on to the next, as a good scientist would. That is what she has done in successive Brussels summits dealing with the euro crisis. Where the world saw a dogmatic Prussian forcing others to be disciplined, the Germans saw a chancellor giving ground to demands from crisis countries and France (on bail-outs, rescue funds and banking union), but cautiously and in the smallest possible increments. As taxpayers, Germans felt she was protecting them even as they understood that more concessions might follow. Mr Bollmann sees this ability to accustom the Germans gradually to new realities, and to know when they are ready to accept more, as Mrs Merkel’s particular genius.
Her “politics of small steps” is communicated in a way her countrymen appreciate and foreigners find baffling. Mrs Merkel speaks with soothing tones and simple, reassuring phrases which often have little content—a “sanitised Lego language, snapping together prefabricated phrases made of hollow plastic,” as Timothy Garton Ash at Oxford University describes it. In part, Mr Garton Ash allows, this is just the modern German fashion. “Because of Hitler, the palette of contemporary German political rhetoric is deliberately narrow, cautious, and boring.” But Mrs Merkel has taken it to new extremes of moderation.
Peer Steinbrück, who as leader of the Social Democrats (SPD) is her main rival in the elections, parodies her well. When he says, “A good foundation is the best precondition for a solid basis in Europe, ladies and gentlemen,” it usually brings the house down because it really does sound like Mrs Merkel. In so doing it allows Mr Steinbrück to position himself, in contrast, as one who dishes out “straight talk”—Klartext. To Mr Steinbrück’s frustration, however, his straight talk often leads to gaffes. When he says that he would not pay less than €5 ($6.63) for a bottle of Pinot Grigio the German public spends a few days affecting outrage that a Social Democrat with blue-collar interests at heart would say such a thing. But when Mrs Merkel does her Mutti-talk, she gets away with it.
ECONOMIST Graphic listing Germany's main political parties and their shifts since 2005.
Both are also known for a wry sense of humour. In Mr Steinbrück’s case, it is broadly ironic (he blames his Danish grandmother for teaching it to him). Mrs Merkel’s humour tends nowadays to be low-key and reserved for private occasions, or at least situations removed from the public glare. The block of flats in which she lives has fewer tenants than it did, for security reasons; so her doorbell, marked discreetly with her husband’s name, Sauer, sits in a row with others marked Ganz, Schön, Lustig, Schön, Ganz (roughly translated: really quite funny, quite really). She is also a woman of culture and emotion. The risk of controversy does not stop her attending the Wagner festival in Bayreuth every summer; while she will sit through and enjoy the Ring Cycle, her particular favourite is said to be “Tristan and Isolde”, with its morbid and tragic beauty.
A good foundation
One of the problems for the SPD and the other large opposition party,
the Greens, in running against Mrs Merkel is that, in an admirable
display of responsibility, they both voted with her at every step in the
euro-rescue. Yes, the Greens, in particular, would have liked to go
faster and would have been open to Eurobonds (issued separately by each
euro-zone government but guaranteed by all), which Mrs Merkel has ruled
out. Bolder action at the beginning might have nipped the crisis in the
bud, says Jürgen Trittin, a leading Green; instead Mrs Merkel “always
delays, then eventually does what we said”. But to most Germans, this
just sounds like nitpicking.For the Greens, this should have been a huge victory. Instead, it allowed Mrs Merkel to neutralise the entire subject. The En ergiewende (“energy turn”), which also encompasses a large and generously subsidised push into renewable energy, means putting up prices when in competitors such as America energy is getting cheaper; this looks worrying to some businesspeople. But there is a consensus behind it among all the main parties. Mr Trittin is reduced to bickering about operational details (power lines and so forth) rather than attacking Mrs Merkel head-on.
This is part of a pattern that has been called Merkelvellianism. By small, sly moves, Mrs Merkel has inched the CDU leftward, poaching one policy after another from her centre-left rivals. For decades the CDU favoured military conscription. Then Mrs Merkel abolished the draft, as the left wanted. When the SPD and Greens promised a minimum wage, Mrs Merkel quickly put forth a similar idea (albeit with flexible wage floors across regions and industries). When old-age poverty became the issue earlier this year, she promised to provide higher pensions for older mothers. When the left called for rent controls this summer, she supported them, too. On only one weighty subject does she squarely oppose the left. They want to raise taxes; she does not.
Mr Steinbrück reaches for every available metaphor to paint Mrs Merkel as a plagiarist lacking any conviction. Living in a country run by her is like driving endlessly round a roundabout—few fender benders but also no direction; her finger doesn’t point the way but only measures which way the wind is blowing: and so forth. Mrs Merkel drives some people in her own centre-right camp just as batty. A book by a veteran CDU adviser calls her Germany’s “godmother”—in the mafia, not the maternal, sense—a person with no values who betrays the ones held by the CDU whenever it suits her. Peter Kohl, the estranged son of the former chancellor, has said that he will abstain from voting because Germany now has, in effect, three social-democratic parties: the SPD, the Greens and Mrs Merkel’s CDU. Outside Germany, she is seen as unbending. (“Austerit ät, that new word: it sounds so evil,” Mrs Merkel jokes in her aw-shucks way.) Inside Germany, she looks as stiff as a plateful of spaghetti.
The best precondition
There is strategic method in her flexibility. By creeping into the
political terrain of the opposition parties, Mrs Merkel hopes to reduce
their supporters’ readiness to go to the polls. In doing so she knows
that she will induce some CDU supporters to stay at home, too. But as
long as she dampens turnout more for the parties of the left than for
her own, she wins. Her political consultants call it “asymmetric
demobilisation”.It is not an elegant or very principled strategy, but it seems a workable one. The CDU is the strongest party, with about 40% in most polls. Though it will not secure an absolute majority, most coalition scenarios play out well for Mrs Merkel. One possibility is a continued partnership between the CDU, its Bavarian sister party (the CSU) and the liberal Free Democrats (FDP), her current coalition partner. Another possibility, which would provide a bigger majority but trickier internal politics, is a grand coalition between the CDU and the SPD like the one that Mrs Merkel ran in her first term. Mr Steinbrück has said that he would not serve in such a government again, but that is not in itself a deal breaker.
A third option is a pact with the Greens. This is less likely because the Greens are at the moment further to the left than the SPD on such issues as tax hikes. But there are moderate greens, especially in south-western Germany. And the party, which shares power in six states, and has shared it with the CDU at state level in the past, is hungry for a return to federal government.
By contrast, an SPD-Green coalition, the only one that Mr Steinbrück has said he would accept, has almost no chance of winning a majority. The only remaining risk to Mrs Merkel is thus an alliance between all the parties of the left, including the party called the Left. But the Left is a pariah in mainstream politics because of its roots in East Germany’s communist party and its goal of leaving or dissolving NATO. Mr Steinbrück wants no part in such a “red-red-green” pact, though others in his party could enter one without him.
Mrs Merkel thus has a good chance of staying in power. A victory would not be an endorsement of her domestic record, since that record is muddled. Instead, it would show that Germans forgive her for not having clear visions at home because she has governed during such unusual times. The global financial crisis began in her first term and spilled over into the euro crisis in her second. Disaster management took precedence over domestic reform.
If Mrs Merkel has a vision, it is that the euro zone and the entire EU should become strong, too. “I experienced the collapse of the German Democratic Republic, I don’t want to see the EU falling behind,” she has said. Her advisers believe that the trauma of 1989 informs her view of the euro zone today. Mrs Merkel often adds a statistic: that Europe has 7% of the world’s population, 25% of its output and 50% of its welfare spending. This is her way of warning that the status quo may not be affordable for much longer.
A solid basis in Europe
Europe “has no legal right to be leading in world history,” she says.
“So we have to be careful that solidarity also leads to results, lest
we all get weak together.” This message is aimed in part at France,
Germany’s longtime partner, which is not reforming as fast as Mrs Merkel
would like. In part, she is addressing Spain, Portugal and Greece, to
encourage them to keep reforming. And in part she is talking, softly but
sternly, to the Germans, lest they forget that as recently as the
1990s, Germany was called “the sick man of Europe”.Keeping the European family healthy takes never-ending hard work and forbearance, says the Protestant pastor’s daughter and Mutti of her nation. For an otherwise protean woman, such sentiments probably do come from conviction.
I really like how the rhombus has become her symbol. It was a very creative solution to her problem.
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