Busting the Merkel Myth

Europe’s celebrated ‘leader of the free world’ dealt with most problems by sweeping them under the rug.

In an age of us-versus-them politics, soon-to-be ex-German Chancellor Angela Merkel might be the only prominent international leader the global demos can actually agree on.

From Poland to Peru, clear majorities profess a favorable view of the East German physicist-turned-politician, whose 16-year tenure running Europe’s largest country draws to a close next week.

In contrast to her best-known contemporaries, who span ex-U.S. president George W. Bush to Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Merkel is as popular abroad as she is at home. That positive glow has also spread across Germany. The country is “held in the highest esteem we’ve ever measured,” the consultancy Gallup recently reported.

While there’s no disputing Merkel’s global standing, the reasons for it are less clear. Beyond the obvious — she didn’t start any wars or lay claim to other countries’ territory — the origin of her popularity is something of a riddle. 

One common explanation is that Merkel’s seriousness, integrity and no-frills approach to politics offer a powerful antidote to the “big swinging dicks” dominating the global power game.

And yet, the woman-is-the-message logic isn’t the whole story.

Unlike other towering political figures of the recent past, be it Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher or even Barack Obama, Merkel can claim no signature achievement. The historic milestones of her era — German reunification and the deepening of the European Union — occurred long before she came to power. Even the economic renaissance Germany enjoyed during her tenure came as the result of reforms undertaken by her predecessor.

Even so, Merkel’s legions of adherents ascribe all manner of monumental achievement to her, spanning human rights to climate policy. They portray her as a fearless crisis fighter whose steady hand navigated Germany and Europe around the shoals of the Lehman Brothers’ collapse, the Greek debt implosion, the refugee crisis and the pandemic. The result is what might best be described as the Merkel Myth.

“At a moment of global political and social rupture, no leader on the world stage has protected the post-World War II liberal democratic order as fiercely as she did, confronting aggressive authoritarians from Putin to Trump,” Katy Marton, the author of a recent biography of the chancellor, writes with admiration in the preface to the book. “She transformed Germany into the leader of Europe — not just an economic leader but a moral one too — and into an immigrant nation by accepting one million Middle Eastern refugees.”

But did Merkel really “confront” global bullies? Did she transform Germany into Europe’s moral leader? Is Berlin the world’s new Ellis Island?

The less charitable view of Merkel is that she spent 16 years riding on the fumes of Germany’s industrial might without tackling the deeper challenges the country faced either at home or abroad.

Throughout, Merkel opted to pacify instead of solve: When crisis erupted, she did just enough to defang the acute problem, only to sweep the larger issues that triggered the implosion under the rug. This tendency, critics argue, is her legacy on everything from the integration of the eurozone to refugees and transatlantic relations. 

Historians are sure to spend decades debating Merkel’s impact on these (and other) fronts for years to come. But why wait? As Merkel leaves office, we’ve taken a first crack at examining her legacy, weighing popular perceptions against the record, in an attempt to separate fact from fiction, myth from reality.

Claim: After Trump’s election, Merkel, already seen by many as the world’s most powerful woman, also became “the leader of the free world,” keeping the candle of democracy burning.

Reality: It was left-leaning American and British newspaper columnists who bestowed Merkel with this moniker, one so far-fetched that she herself called it “grotesque and absurd.” Though Merkel was clearly not a fan of Trump, she never lost sight of where Germany’s bread was buttered. Just weeks after Trump’s inauguration, she traveled to Washington, a large delegation in tow, to try to win over the American president and his family.

While that effort ultimately failed, Merkel understood better than most the degree to which Europe’s prosperity and security (and especially Germany’s) depended on America. That explains her decision, in the face of Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs aimed at German industry, to substantially increase defense spending — and even commit to buy American weaponry. It’s also why, despite his attacks on multilateralism and the “liberal order” she holds dear, Merkel never broke with Trump.     

Bottom line: Merkel wasn’t so much the leader of the free world as she was the mascot of a global establishment that identified her as its last great hope. Whatever power she had was of the soft variety.

Reality: This assertion is rooted in the European debt crisis, originating in Greece in late 2009 and spreading to other countries on the eurozone’s periphery. Preserving the euro, the greatest expression of European integration, was crucial to keep the EU itself from collapsing. That’s why Merkel’s decision to bail out Greece is viewed by her supporters as a seminal moment in EU history.

At best though, that’s only half true. Her government’s initial response was to provide loans to Greece under usurious terms that destabilized its political system and tipped the country into a depression from which it has yet to recover. The economic austerity Europe imposed on Greece at Germany’s insistence was of a scale not seen in Europe since the war, which explains why Merkel’s approval rating there is just 30 percent.

Germans suffered too. After Greece defaulted, German taxpayers were forced to pour much more money into the country than would have been necessary had Merkel listened to reason at the outset. Merkel also willfully ignored Germany’s historic complicity in Greece’s woes. Despite clear evidence in the years leading up to the introduction of the euro that Greece was unprepared to join the currency union, Germany, under Helmut Kohl, insisted it do so, and looked the other way as Athens cooked the books.

That tortured history notwithstanding, the oversight and bailout infrastructure that grew out of the crisis remain in place and represent a significant leap towards steeling Europe against such shocks. Merkel’s agreement with French President Emmanuel Macron last year to issue common EU debt for the creation of a €750 billion pandemic reconstruction fund is a further step in that direction, one some observers regard as her most significant European legacy.

Bottom line: It’s a mixed picture. Merkel, hemmed in by her center-right party and that ur German phobia Europe would pick its pockets, managed to keep the euro from collapsing — but only just. At the same time, she did next to nothing to resolve the biggest threat to the euro: Economic imbalances between Germany and the rest of the currency area, which remain stubbornly high despite a recent pandemic-induced dent.

politico