Angela Merkel: enigmatic leader of a divided land

It is often said that Angela Merkel is the most powerful woman in the world. She is probably also the most powerful figure in the history of the European Union. She has been German chancellor for a decade. And yet, despite having so much power for so long, she remains a mystery.

We have little idea what Merkel really thinks. It is not only that she is herself remarkably uncommunicative for a modern politician but also that most of what is said about her is either spin or speculation.

She has a handful of ultra-loyal confidants, who can be guaranteed, when they speak about her, to tell the story she wants people to hear. Meanwhile, those who are outside this inner circle don’t really know what she is thinking or what motivates her, though many often claim to. As a result, Merkel is more opaque than perhaps any other head of government in the west.

According to Stefan Kornelius, the foreign editor of the Munich-based Süddeutsche Zeitung, who wrote an authorised biography of her, published in 2013, Merkel’s anachronistic reticence has its origins in her childhood in East Germany. It was there, as she herself once put it an in interview, she “learned to keep quiet”.

Merkel’s father, Horst Kasner, was a Protestant pastor who, shortly after her birth in 1954, moved with his family from Hamburg to Templin, a small town 50 miles north of Berlin, where he took over a seminary.

Although the family discussed politics at home, Merkel learned from an early age to be careful about what she said to other people in the world beyond the family’s “protected idyll”, as Kornelius calls it. “The mystery that is Merkel has its roots in that doomed republic,” he writes.

If Kornelius is right, it suggests, somewhat disturbingly, that Merkel has imported into the democratic culture of the Federal Republic a political style that comes out of the authoritarian culture of the German Democratic Republic. It is as if she has recreated the “protected idyll” of her childhood within the chancellery in Berlin.

This remote figure was perhaps the perfect leader for the somewhat post-democratic Germany that has existed for the last decade. Since becoming chancellor in 2005, Merkel has been the embodiment of an extraordinary consensus in German politics. For two of the last three electoral periods since then, she has led a grand coalition of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats.

Between them, the two parties currently have 503 out of 630 seats in the Bundestag, an extraordinary majority that means that they can, and do, ignore the opposition left and Greens. (Last year, Merkel was even reprimanded for talking too loudly in the Bundestag while a Green MP was speaking).

The grand coalition was held together by an ideological convergence as the Social Democrats moved to the right on economic policy (most notably in supporting her in imposing austerity on the rest of the eurozone) and the Christian Democrats moved to the left on social and environmental policy (most notably in phasing out nuclear power – the so-called Energiewende). Last year, a leading Social Democrat, Torsten Albrig, even questioned whether his party needed its own candidate for chancellor in the next election (scheduled for 2017) because Merkel was doing such an “excellent” job.

However, the refugee crisis has shattered what might be called the “Merkel consensus” and Germany has suddenly become a deeply divided country. Just as the consensus of the last decade centred on her, so now does the increasingly polarised debate about the refugee crisis. Since last autumn, she has been praised and criticised for opening Germany’s borders to refugees from around the world, seen by both her supporters and her critics as a sudden and surprising departure from her usual pragmatism.

Merkel’s supporters explain and justify this transformation in two ways – both of which should be treated with scepticism. One has to do with her upbringing in East Germany. “I lived behind a fence too long for me to now wish for those times to return,” she is supposed to have said to the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán. The other is that we are seeing is a manifestation of the Christian compassion that she learned growing up in the seminary, which included a home for disabled people. In short, in the refugee crisis, she is the good Samaritan.

In fact, however, what actually happened last autumn was more complicated and less deliberate than these explanations suggest. Rather than making a dramatic decision to “open Germany’s borders”, Merkel took a series of small steps in a complex situation and then failed to take action to change course.

This had huge consequences for Germany and for the rest of Europe that she may not even have grasped – and now it is difficult to see a way out. In that sense, Merkel’s decision-making looks less like a departure from her previous style, as many believe, than a continuation of it.

As usual, Merkel waited as long as she possibly could – after all, for several years as the conflict in Syria worsened, Germany did very little while Greece and Italy were overwhelmed by the influx of refugees – and reacted, rather than acted, only when it was absolutely necessary. This looks rather like her approach to the euro crisis, except that while in that case there was a consensus in Germany behind her, in the refugee crisis it is dividing Germany.

Merkel placed a huge bet on the willingness of the German people to accept, and integrate, millions of asylum seekers. Last summer, after it became clear that the number of asylum seekers arriving in Germany in 2015 would be much higher than the authorities had originally thought, she told the German public: “Wir schaffen das!” (“We can do it!”)

Her apparent determination to integrate millions of asylum seekers into German society won her new supporters on the left, which again makes it look like a typical Merkel move.

This time, however, it has also alienated many on the right, including many within her own party. In an extraordinary interview with a newspaper last month, the Bavarian leader, Horst Seehofer, said that there was now a “Herrschaft des Unrechts” in Germany – in other words, that the rule of law no longer existed.

The terminology he used evoked the concept of an Unrechtstaat, normally used to describe totalitarian or criminal states such as the German Democratic Republic or the Nazi state. In other words, he is challenging not just Merkel and government policy but the legitimacy of the state itself.

Today’s elections in three German states have been hyped as a moment of truth for Merkel. The dubious deal she agreed with Turkey – and the decision by EU member states along the “Balkan route” to close their borders – may go some way to reassuring voters that the numbers of asylum seekers coming to Germany will now decrease. Nevertheless, the Christian Democrats are likely to take a big hit and the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, AfD) – created in 2013 as a direct response to Merkel’s declaration that “there is no alternative” to her approach to the euro crisis – is likely to win enough votes to sit in all three state parliaments.

Whatever happens today, it is difficult to see how Merkel could be deposed as chancellor, not least because it is difficult to see who could succeed her apart from the 73 year-old finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble. Some claim that she will be forced to change course on the refugee crisis. But she has already made it clear that, as in the euro crisis, she believes there is “no alternative” to her approach.

The danger, though, is that this will further increase the sense of powerlessness that her opponents feel and fuel the radicalisation that is taking place. A small but growing minority in Germany feels it has no way of influencing policy through the democratic process and has no alternative but to take matters into its own hands and “resist” state power. They are being empowered and emboldened by statements made by Seehofer and AfD leaders such as Björn Höcke, who speaks of an impending “civil war” in Germany.

Last October, Henriette Reker, a 59-year-old woman who worked as the city of Cologne’s social affairs commissioner and was standing as a candidate for mayor, was stabbed and seriously injured by a man who was apparently enraged by the wave of immigrants.

Last year, when Merkel herself visited the town of Heidenau in Saxony Anhalt (one of the three states that votes today) and was called a “traitor”, her spokesperson said there was a “lynch mob atmosphere”.

Merkel is likely to remain chancellor and the grand coalition will remain in place until the election next year, and perhaps even beyond it, as if the Merkel consensus still existed. But beneath the surface, and in part as a reaction against Merkel’s perceived intransigence, Germany is becoming angrier and more violent.

Hans Kundnani is a senior transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund

THE MERKEL FILE

Born Angela Dorothea Kasner in 1954 in Hamburg, West Germany. She grew up in the countryside north of East Berlin after her father moved the family across the frontier in 1954 just a few weeks after she was born. She is married to Joachim Sauer; she has no children but Sauer has two sons from a previous marriage.

Best of times Rising through the ranks of the CDU. When Helmut Kohl, the first chancellor of a reunified Germany, became embroiled in a slush fund scandal, the party hesitated. But Merkel was the first to openly call for his resignation, establishing herself as an alternative. Kohl had previously been her mentor and liked to refer to her as mein Mädchen, or “my girl”

Worst of times The ongoing refugee crisis, which has left the EU struggling come up with a solution to cope with the biggest influx of migrants to the continent since the Second World War.

What she says “I am regarded as a permanent delayer sometimes, but I think it is essential and extremely important to take people along and really listen to them in political talks.”

What others say “She’s not a woman of strong emotions...Too much emotion disturbs your reason. She watches politics like a scientist.”

Bernd Ulrich, the deputy editor of Die Zeit (told to the New Yorker).