After 16 years as Germany's chancellor, 'Mutti' is exiting the international stage. What did she stand for and what will her legacy be?
Each weekday morning Angela Merkel would wake up at 5am, put on her cardigan and corduroy trousers, skirt the perimeter of the Berlin Wall and catch the 6.15 from Friedrichstrasse to Adlershof. If she was very lucky she might pick up a copy of Pravda to read on the way. The rest of the time the only broadsheet on the news stands was Neues Deutschland, a meticulously censored snoozefest issued by the communist regime of East Germany. Tractor production in Romania, Comrade Gorbachev in Yakutsk, devious fascists in Bonn.
Getting off the train she would pass through the tangle of barbed wire and sloe bushes surrounding the physical chemistry faculty of the national Academy of Sciences, a gloomy concrete box on the southeastern outskirts of Berlin. She spent her days punching calculations for the decomposition of hydrocarbons into a 20-year-old wind-up computer from Hewlett-Packard.
But in the evenings, returning to the flat she had squatted in Mitte, she would retreat into her secret world. She watched the West German television news, noting down every name, every face, every political speech of significance. She read, furiously and omnivorously: Bulgakov, Gorbachev, the liberal philosopher Karl Popper, the Marxist critic of capitalism Herbert Marcuse. She was, she later said, like a hamster gathering bedding for the long winter ahead.
Until the wall fell in November 1989, this was Merkel's double life: unassuming, industrious, circumspect, concealing a wild whirr of intellectual activity behind a façade of dull scientific diligence.
This autumn, scarcely three decades after those grey days of hibernation under the shadow of Moscow, and after 16 years as the chancellor of reunified Germany, Merkel, 67, is preparing to retire.
For years her classic slogan for voters on the campaign trail has been "You know me". But they don't really. Merkel's guiding beliefs are as much of a mystery to the electorate in 2021 as they were to her scientific colleagues in the late 1980s. She remains the most enigmatic leader in western politics.
Occasionally little details will trickle out about her private life. We know that she likes singing and making potato soup. She listens to Richard Wagner and Bruce Springsteen. She's a superb impressionist and can mimic other world leaders to perfection. She's afraid of dogs and had difficulty walking until she was 12.
She used to smoke but gave up when she got her first ministerial job. Sometimes on Saturday afternoons she treats herself to a pilsner and a Bayern Munich game on the television. She lives with her second husband, Joachim Sauer, an internationally respected chemist, in a modest two-bedroom apartment on Am Kupfergraben, a street in Mitte, the museum quarter in Berlin where she once lived in a squat.
What we don't know is what she actually thinks about the things that matter: China, abortion, Russian gas pipelines, genetic engineering, refugees, her political succession, nuclear power, Joe Biden, the urgency of global warming. What, in short, has it all been for?
Merkel's Yoda-like motto, which she once let slip to one of her old rivals, is In der Ruhe liegt die Kraft. In quiet there is power. Her public statements tend to be guarded, noncommittal, sometimes contradictory, veiled with flannel and scraps of dry humour. Almost nothing leaks out of her inner circle unless she wants it to. (I did, however, get wind of her opinion of Boris Johnson: senior officials in Berlin gossip that she finds him so slippery and blustery that she can hardly bring herself to speak to him on the telephone.)
To understand the most powerful woman in the world and how she wields that power, you have to go back to the beginning, in a red-roofed three-storey building in the east German town of Templin. Like Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May, Angela Merkel (née Kasner — she took her surname from a short-lived first marriage in her twenties) is a Protestant preacher's daughter. Unlike Thatcher and May, she grew up under communism in a totalitarian quasi-dictatorship, the German Democratic Republic (GDR).
Her father Horst Kasner, nicknamed "Red Kasner", moved his young family from Hamburg in the west to Templin in the east when she was nearly three years old. He ran a training centre for young ordinands and an institute that looked after 200 people with disabilities.
"That's the foundation stone," says Annette Schavan, 66, a former cabinet minister who for two decades was one of Merkel's closest friends in politics. "She's always said, 'Of course we didn't have a bad life — even under tough conditions you can strive to lead a good and honest life.' That's what she had in her father's rectory at Waldhof [a compound on the outskirts of Templin], with the pastoral care of those disabled people. Those were truly formative experiences in her childhood and youth."
By the standards of the GDR it was a privileged little world — the Kasner family had access to books and conversations that would have been forbidden outside the walls of their home — but also a dangerous one. The Stasi, which mistrusted the church and deemed Horst Kasner an enemy of the state, watched him like hawks. "We were always the outsiders," Merkel said many years later. Her mother used to tell her each morning before she left for school: "You've got to be better than all the others, or they'll never let you go to university."
She was. The girl was by and large a model pupil, routinely top of her class, winning a national Russian language competition and a ticket to Moscow. But she also had a subversive streak. At university in Leipzig she was reprimanded for covertly reading physics textbooks during a lecture on Marxist-Leninist thought. She tended the bar at a basement student disco, mixing primitive cocktails with cherry brandy. She hitchhiked illegally to the Caucasus with two of her friends, spending a night at a homeless shelter in Tbilisi.
In 1978 she obtained a post at the national Academy of Sciences. Apart from the secretaries she was the only woman in the building. Especially since the advent of Covid-19, much has been made of Merkel as the scientist-chancellor. Her fans like to imagine her solving political problems with the same cool, methodical, unbiased approach she once took to cracking hydrocarbon reactions.
The truth is a bit more complicated. Merkel's scientific training and analytical cast of mind certainly do give her a head start on some knotty issues of Covid policy. She can rattle off descriptions of exponential growth and the R-number as well as any TV epidemiologist. She often talks about politics in terms of ideas borrowed from physics: conservation laws, under which what goes up must come down, or Brownian motion, with trends as the sum of innumerable random disturbances.But running a country isn't the same thing as running an experiment. Merkel's gift for casting her choices as the only rational decision to make, a knack sometimes described with the horrible German word Alternativlosigkeit ("alternativelessness"), is as much a clever piece of spin as an actual method. In reality some of her moves are poorly thought through and there are almost always viable alternatives. During the pandemic, for example, she has been criticised in Germany for leaning too heavily on the advice of a handful of virologists who tend to bolster her own inherently cautious instincts, rather than consulting more widely.
In political terms Merkel's youth under communism has been both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because she came to democratic politics in her mid-thirties with fresh eyes, an almost naive level of enthusiasm and little of the cynical baggage that weighed down her West German rivals. And a curse because her opponents have been able to weaponise her past against her.
There's no evidence she informed on her colleagues for the Stasi, but during the dying days of the GDR Merkel did become the secretary for "agitation and propaganda" in the local branch of the ruling party's youth wing. The job didn't seem to involve much agitation or propaganda — Merkel says she spent most of her time organising book readings and theatre tickets — but this curious blot on her CV has occasionally come back to haunt her. In the 1990s one of her more hysterical rivals in the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) likened bringing her into the cabinet to putting Goebbels in charge of a postwar German ministry.
Merkel's critics, particularly in Britain, often insinuate that her upbringing under communism has left her with a hidden but indelible set of secretive, authoritarian, even anti-democratic instincts. Schavan says the opposite is true. As a young woman Merkel worshipped freedom, capitalism and liberal democracy with the fervour of someone denied all of these things.
The most significant turning point in Merkel's life came on November 9, 1989, when the border crossings in the Berlin Wall were suddenly flung open. For the first time in her 35 years she was truly free. She celebrated this moment with typically Merkelish exuberance: she went to her local sauna, just as she did on every Thursday after work. A few hours later she had a beer and wandered across to the other side for a bit, then went home for a solid night's sleep.
That subdued evening was the beginning of what has been described as the steepest political rise in Germany's postwar history. Scarcely a year later Merkel was an MP in the reunified German parliament and minister for women and youth in the federal cabinet. A year after that, in 1991, she was made deputy leader of the ruling party, the CDU. In 1994 she became the environment minister, in 1998 CDU general secretary, in 2000 CDU leader and in 2005 chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany.
At first she owed her astounding ascent to good old-fashioned tokenism. Helmut Kohl, the bearlike chancellor, needed more women on his team and he needed East Germans. Merkel ticked both boxes. Kohl paraded her around the way a 13th-century king might have shown off a pet flamingo. In 1991 he took her to Washington and introduced her to George HW Bush as "my new woman". He notoriously nicknamed her his Mädchen: Kohl's girl.
"It was beyond anything I'd ever wished for," Merkel once said in an interview. "All of a sudden I was sitting at the cabinet table with all these people I'd admired on the television my whole life long. And then I thought, if you can calculate integrals, you can manage a conversation with Norbert Blüm [one of Kohl's most senior ministers]."
Even in those early days, though, Merkel was no one's vapid window-dressing. Soon she was so well versed in power politics that the civil servants in her first ministry nicknamed her "Angie the Snake". "You had no idea what she wanted," one of them told Evelyn Roll, an early Merkel biographer, "and then suddenly she'd snapped you up."
She began to develop what are now the stock tricks of her political tradecraft: the delaying tactics, the flashing stiletto remark in the middle of an otherwise platitudinous media appearance, the relentless negotiations where she strives to keep all parties at the table until the early hours of the morning. "Perhaps," she said after one especially taxing round of international climate talks in Berlin, "a compromise is a good one precisely when everyone involved is in a bad mood at the end."
Merkel still betrayed signs of inexperience. She cried in one cabinet meeting after she was forced to cancel a press conference on smog because her fellow ministers couldn't agree what to do about it.
But she soon toughened up. In 1998 Kohl, Merkel and the CDU were kicked out of office by the German electorate. The party was shaken by an illegal donations scandal that tore through its upper echelons like a purge, polishing off Kohl and half a dozen of his putative successors. The CDU was in tatters: divided, rudderless, paranoid, still half under the spell of the unscrupulous godfather figure who had led it for the previous 25 years.
Merkel seized her moment and struck. While her rivals dithered, she administered a ruthless coup de grâce to Kohl with a signed newspaper article calling for him to withdraw from politics and for her party to go through an abnabelung: the cutting of the umbilical cord. One by one she outmanoeuvred her male competitors and dispatched them to what the German tabloid Bild once called the "graveyard behind the chancellery". Within months she won the CDU leadership, becoming the first woman to take charge of a mainstream party in German history.
She began to assemble a tight-knit squad of aides who still form the core of her inner circle today: Beate Baumann, the head of her office; Eva Christiansen, her speechwriter and head of planning; Schavan, who later became her education minister and was regarded as a potential successor until she had to resign in 2013 when she was revealed to have plagiarised parts of her PhD thesis.
To these confidantes Merkel has since added Steffen Seibert, a former TV news anchor who runs her media operation; Helge Braun, a doctor who is now her chief of staff; and Braun's predecessor Peter Altmaier, who left to take over the economics ministry.
Being a woman at the helm of a German conservative party was not an easy job in the early 2000s. CDU right-wingers sneeringly referred to Merkel's female-dominated office as the "girls' camp". Titanic magazine, the German equivalent of Private Eye, put an unflattering picture of her on its front page with the splashy headline: "Can something like this become chancellor?" Male journalists made snide asides about her unglamorous coiffeur and her long baggy skirts, which eventually gave way to sober trouser suits. Jokes about her appearance circulated in Berlin: "What does Angela Merkel's hairdresser actually do for a living?"
In fact she was, at least in the early years, acutely self-conscious about her image. Her characteristic gesture, the "Merkel diamond" formed with her forefingers and thumbs, started out simply because she needed something to do with her twitchy hands. She could hardly bear to watch herself on the TV news bulletins, sometimes screwing up her eyes so she would not have to see.
Merkel is, by her own account, not a feminist. In the Nineties she initially opposed Kohl's plan for a quota of female politicians. And yet she has consistently taken them into her confidence and promoted them to what she regarded as the pinnacle of their abilities. Her view is that women just have to be better than their male rivals. "When men get ahead, that's the natural course of things," she once said. "But when a woman succeeds in politics, then you'll find assassinated men lying all along the wayside of her road to power."
In 2005 that success arrived: Merkel defeated her nemesis, the chancellor and leader of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), Gerhard Schröder, by a margin of just over a percentage point at the Bundestag election. Yet her only realistic option for forming a government was a "grand coalition" with the SPD, her party's bitterest rival. It wasn't quite as implausible as a tie-up would be between Labour and the Conservatives in Britain but it was not far off. At the helm of an experimental and fractious alliance, she took charge of a country in the economic doldrums, derided as the sick man of Europe, profoundly unsure of its place in the world.
It was a tough gig. But Merkel swiftly patched things up with the US, turned her Frankenstein's monster of a ruling coalition into a cogent and largely effective governmental machine, and oversaw a spectacular economic boom largely based on the painful welfare reforms enacted by Schröder. When she took office the unemployment rate had just peaked at 11.3 per cent and GDP had more or less stagnated for the best part of a decade. As she leaves it, unemployment is at 5.6 per cent, despite a small jump caused by the pandemic. Even SPD cabinet colleagues have been impressed by her collegiate and patient leadership.
"I think she only began to develop her own personal style as chancellor in those early years, but then she stuck to it through all the years that followed," says Barbara Hendricks, 69, an SPD politician who served under Merkel as environment minister.
"She never resorted to her formal power to overrule us … Her particular strength is that on the one hand she always waits, that she's tentative, so to speak, and very seldom cuts through the Gordian knot — but when she has to act, she does. And the strength, the flipside of this way of working, is that she takes everyone with her and no one loses face. And that matters a lot when you're working together."
Peer Steinbrück, 74, was the finance minister in that first Merkel government and was later trounced by the chancellor in the 2013 election. He seems to harbour no ill feeling towards her. "She isn't pretentious or brash, unlike some of the macho figures on the national and international stage during her time in office," he says. "She has a great gift for calibrating [personal] distance and closeness. In a small group she can be very amiable, and ironic and humorous, too.
"In bigger groups she's much more distanced, very matter-of-fact. She absolutely loathes any sort of chummy behaviour … She has astonishing discipline, behind which she's able to hide her deeper feelings. Most of the time, anyway."
For 12 of her 16 years in office Merkel has ruled through coalitions with her most significant electoral competitor. She has spent at least 10 of those 16 years fighting for survival in the face of a series of international crises: the turmoil in the eurozone, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the migrant influx of 2015, the pandemic. At the same time she has been the first German chancellor thoroughly to squeeze France out of the EU driving seat.
On her watch Germany has also gradually transformed into an Einwanderungsland, a "country of immigration", after she abandoned her early fixation on making new arrivals subscribe to "German values" and allowed more than a million immigrants to enter the country in a single year.
Under her rule Germany's old party-political divisions have ceased to matter as much as they once did. The Manichean struggle between left and right of the postwar decades has given way to a more technocratic tussle for the centre. "Take a close look and tell me, what is the difference between the SPD and the CDU today?" says Sigmar Gabriel, 61, a big beast from the SPD who was economics then foreign minister in the last Merkel government. "The whole of German society has become more liberal, more social democratic, if you like. We no longer have a situation where the CDU and the SPD are political enemies. We're rivals, but we haven't been enemies for a long time now."
And now, at some point in the next few months, Merkel will become the first German leader to leave office not because she has to but because she wants to. In a lot of other ways, though, she has ended up being quite a conventional chancellor. She dropped the tax-cutting, red tape-slashing zeal of her early years in favour of maintaining a firm regulatory grip on the tiller. She largely continued the nationalist and fiscally parsimonious economic policies of the Kohl and Schröder eras.
She has been fairly uncompromising in defence of what she sees as Germany's national interest and distinctly lukewarm in her Atlanticism, joining up with China and Russia to abstain in the UN Security Council vote on the 2011 intervention in Libya. She briefly locked swords with Moscow and Beijing, including a 2007 meeting with the Dalai Lama, before reverting to Schröder's old pattern of accommodating the Russians and buttering up the Chinese markets with annual visits to promote German business.
All of which raises the eternal Merkel question: what has it all been for? At a press conference two decades ago her old frenemy and party boss Wolfgang Schäuble was asked whether she was more interested in power for its own sake or in turning her ideological convictions into reality. He squirmed for a moment and then said the former. "Is that a good basis on which to do politics today?" the reporter asked. Schäuble replied: "I suspect so."
Merkel's directionless last four years in office have only entrenched her critics' suspicions that she wields what a British diplomat has described as "power without purpose". Yet not one of the half-dozen former colleagues of Merkel's I spoke to shared this assessment. Even her old rivals were full of praise for her moral compass.
"Well, of course she has a pragmatic approach, but I'm firmly convinced that she feels a profound sense of duty to humanity and that this is a big and important matter [for her]," says Hendricks, the former environment minister from the SPD.
Merkel may not have anything that could obviously be called an ideology, but that isn't to say she has no principles. The sum of the beliefs she has expressed over her three decades in politics, deeply rooted in the 35 years she had previously spent in the GDR, adds up to something like this:
1. Liberal democracy is a precious thing, and far more vulnerable than most of its adherents dare to imagine.
2. Modern society is a battleground of competing interests and a real leader's job is not to pick a single side but to try to meld them all together into something coherent and acceptable to the majority of citizens.
3. Freedom and capitalism are the twin engines of progress but neither is an absolute good, and both must be moderated to protect the individual.
4. Europe and the wider world are intrinsically unstable and precarious places whose best hope of security resides in dialogue, rules and compromise.
"She's read a huge amount of history in all those years," Schavan says. "This is the first period in Europe's history when peace and integration have actually succeeded, but it always remains — and she's experienced this in all these crises — a fragile thing you have to take care of that won't stay strong of its own accord, that you need to keep fighting for anew, over and over again."
This may help to explain Merkel's unwillingness to compromise on Brexit. First David Cameron turned up in the middle of the 2015 migration crisis and a fresh round of nail-biting in the eurozone to demand limits on free movement in the EU and the right to hold up the bloc's legislation with a "red card".
The timing could hardly have been worse: from the chancellor's point of view, Cameron was trying to solve a domestic political problem by loosening the bonds of union across half a continent, just when they needed to be held together.
After the 2016 referendum result Merkel was sorry to see Britain go, but not enough to hand out any special treatment. The limb had to be amputated cleanly so that the infection wouldn't spread to the rest of the body. That meant insisting on hard customs borders, not just to discourage the Eurosceptics in other EU countries, but to give the remaining 27 EU member states a simple negotiating line they could all stick to.
There is also a faintly perceptible background hum of Christian doctrine in Merkel's thinking, both in the sense of charity towards the weak and a slightly conservative view of what a person can be (she voted against gay marriage and has blocked efforts to reform Germany's laws on abortion and gender identity).
None of this is terribly exciting, but that's the point. This is a country where the CDU used to campaign with the slogan "No experiments". Germany has had more than its fill of melodrama over the past century. For much of her time in power, Merkel gave her supporters a feeling of security, the sense of being safe in the hands of a system as dependable as a BMW car or a Bosch washer-dryer. They don't worry about how or why it works. They just care that it works.
In the twilight of the Merkel years, this way of doing business seems to have run out of road. "There's one thing she can't do and that is to provide outspoken political leadership," Gabriel, her former foreign minister, says. "I mean, she leads, but she doesn't lead by standing out in front and explaining what's happening in the world, what that means in Europe, what that means for Germany. She doesn't do that.
"At the end of the Merkel era there are still very, very many positive things, but also a real problem. Her style has left the Germans mentally unprepared for a world that has changed completely. The nickname Mutti suits her. She treats the country like her children, whom she wants to protect from the evil of the world, so to speak."
Sooner or later the apron strings will be torn. The campaign for this month's general election — a three-way fight between the CDU/CSU, the SPD and the Greens — is in effect a contest for Merkel's mantle. None of the three parties has put forward policies that seriously deviate from her playbook. Greens claim she will secretly vote for their party and Olaf Scholz, the finance minister and SPD leader, has had himself photographed making the Merkel diamond with his hands. For now, letting go of Mutti seems hard to do. But change is coming.
Written by: Oliver Moody
© The Times of London