The Kanzlerin

A truth not widely acknowledged in the era of supposedly hegemonic liberal democracy - which under her aegis came to a dramatic shift - is the observation that the leader of the predominant European economy, the beacon of free institutions, modest government and respect for the rule of law of the continent, did not herself vote in a free election until age 35. Born under the boot of the nascent federal republic and the man inaugurating the Bundeskanzleramt, her Vorbild Konrad Adenauer, the great chancellor himself purged and briefly interned by Nazis for opposition sympathies and a country remade but lacking an army, an armed police service and having only just come out of the last row of hangings by ever-present and supreme occupation authorities.

Ironically it was a religious calling that brought six-month old Angela Kasner east of the border, to be raised, educated and eventually caught in the land of Ulbricht and Honecker, beyond the Iron Curtain. In its starkly socialist and simultaneous victorian society - whose reemergence in the culture of unified Germany has been one of the most tumultuous and duplicitous accomplishment-failures of her political career - she studied Russian, mathematics, physics and at age 32 earned a doctorate in quantum chemistry at the German Academy of Sciences, in a divided Berlin. Angela and husband Ulrich Merkel, from whom she separated under the fairly tolerant laws of the DDR after a five-year childless marriage. The name would stay, and follow her to Bonn.

Spiriting to power in the havoc and hope emerging from the buzzing and breaking that marked the jovial end of the wall that parted her city, Kennedy's city, in two Merkel joined the opposition party Demokratischer Aufbruch before the first and last multi-list elections to the Volkskammer in the spring of 1990, soon emerging as the right hand of Eastern CDU leader Lothar de Maizière, again last and only widely "elected" Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the democratic republic. Rising quickly in a time fit for molding heroes and leaders and names, akin to her later rival Viktor Orban, the chemist-turned-politician joined the list of the CDU and was elected to the national Bundestag, beginning her political journey at the eve of unification, in a city soon fit for the relocation of a united, democratic parliamentary government lost in a cold German spring nearly sixty years before.

The triangle, the gesture inversed. 

What would have become of Kohl without the emergence of this new giant, opposed - now conclusively known - and certainly watched with skepticism from the United Kingdom, France and several of the now liberated capitals of its brethren of emerging Eastern Bloc states we know not, but ultimately meant another eight-year hiatus for the prevailing Union, though forced to contend not only with the social liberal values setting root, but the predictable economic reactions suffered in the newly constituted states. Before very long, Ostalgie would be too apparent in a society not taking enough economic advantage by the new hegemons. Within, the party was ripped apart by factional infighting, corruption scandals of the breed sparing not even German long-term dominant-party technocracy and a long-standing (but ultimately unsustainable) ethos of ascetic, part Lutheran-Kantian, part catholic conservative values, but also the country's role in a clearly existing and deeply hierarchical Atlanticist bond.

Merkel took no clear sides, but worked heavily in favour of long-standing chairman Helmut Kohl through a series of ministries, rising to the post of party secretary upon the great man's downfall in 1998. The neoliberal sceptre of the 1980s had now passed itself, rather than being passed, over to the SPD in a trend making the exile of the power party even more uneasy, if not harming them in the long run. The rejection of Die Union and liberal FDP, its nymphomaniac but recurring partner, in favour of "red-green" majority, it was far more ignominious than before. Whether Germans were really tired of the grey austerity of "Kohlism" (put the definite article of alcohol's native Arabic on that) or disillusioned by unification and the vast gulf between its limitless promise and age-old dream and the reality of formerly enslaved and impoverished (as it was quite commonly referred in CDU propaganda) eastern brethren and apparent realities cannot be established. But it was, in favour both of SPD tutelage, the flamboyant, active, even aggressive personality of Gerhard Schröder and further reforms chipping at the Sozialwirtschaft model (Erhard's grand creation, if not, in that regard, CDU:s) that was the order of the day. The shift, typical of its time but somewhat unfamiliar in the pragmatic, quiet, organised, consensus-dominated facets of the German body politic, came first with ease to Germany but would be followed by a similar and stronger disenchantment, as Schröder failed to live up to the foreign and domestic challenges facing this new and walking giant on the economic and political stage.

If a different style was needed to counter this new time and challenges, embodied by post-division Germany's first and belligerent leader, it would first seem it was coming. With Thatcher, also an "iron" lady on account of her academic credentials, fresh in memory and few other models to equal her, she was labeled an aggressive, if not shrill, somewhat dejected voice of the opposition and the ostensible party of power. A voice, one would later observe, of a woman who had been raised to listen, and to speak carefully. In 2000, she finally succeeded heavily experienced but broadly shunned rival Wolfgang Schäuble as head of the CDU, a position had been as equal to the chancellorship in the federal democratic era as that of the Tory Party had in the United Kingdom. But in a twist to this parallell as well she lost the position of Kanzlerkandidat to CSU:s Edmund Stoiber in 2002, the second such upstart after its legendary long-term leader Franz-Josef Strauß in 1980 (shortly before Kohl's national rise).

And so Stoiber lost, if very barely, situating Merkel untarnished in position for a bid four years later. Or perhaps it would be less. The problems for the "new" SPD were surging. Conflicts with the United States over the Atlanticist bond, with other allies over international entanglements and business relations with the new, "free" Russia, the inability to formulate a coherent foreign policy (a fact ruthlessly undercut by CDU veterans, including Schäuble) and continually rampant unemployment particularly in the recently annexed Eastern provinces, as they had already been labeled, and uncertainty about his financial dealings ultimately cut the loud-spoken Schröder out of favour. In 2005, a snap election ushered in an intense electoral campaign, in which Merkel was continually criticised for failing to hit the "open goal" that was the wreck of the SPD regime as well as open gaffes in national debates, and a cold attitude and uncertainty about her preferred coalition partners and policy proposals. But cold came out in favour and blue conquered over the brand-new red with a few more seats, and intenser-still negotiations for a Großkoalition. It was a hallmark of the more intense Cold War years, but the resulting deal made Merkel the head of the government, SPD tycoon Frank-Walter Steinmeier the minister of foreign affairs and the mild, meek Peer Steinbrück minister of finance, and would put the CDU on top for a succeeding number of administrations that would lay down and destroy her allies and isolate any attempt at parliamentary opposition.

The politics came to concern the European Union, particularly for the first ten years. Continued and increased social spending, devolution of powers and a rebuilt army would be hallmarks of domestic policy, but only overseen to a severe cost of alienation from a continuing changing electorate. But it was European affairs would dominate her term and (carrying on as we speak) more so for perhaps any chancellor since the great Adenauer. The Union had just welcomed new members, including the somewhat speeded inclusion of recently curtained, just democratised states of Eastern Europe suffering from numerous economic and social ills in addition to political and identity issues, afflictions yet affecting some adolescent members such as Spain, Portugal and Greece, all relatively recently delivered from military dictatorship, clerical fascism and economic degradation. The railroading of the Euro, introduced under Schröder and his neighbour Chirac (now Merkel's) as a currency for "Europe" and expected to be established as such, superseding the old system of EMS and open Deutsche Mark dominance. But masks are only a membrane and upon completion - only partially introduced under the still-dominant notion of national sovereignty and a union of peoples - it was hardly pretended the European Central Bank, openly situated in Frankfurt on the Main, would not carry a similar scepter on account of German interests. The Lisbon Treaty, her largest accomplishment on the European area, chipped away at the political notion of confederacy in favour of a developing union but cut short from a proposed "constitution of Europe" after fresh rebellions in Ireland, France and the Netherlands, failed to establish the institutions that - after much struggle and unease, in times of struggle and unease - had established the same for the United States, by the superseding of the Articles of Confederacy by the Constitution (no specifics needed). Furthermore, it came under question - if not until the crash predictably forced the forces of contradiction to inevitable clash for space - to what extent such a European brethren did exist, or did have to be created, by untold means but the proverbial wait and hope.

Nonwithstanding, these were historic accomplishments and on the home scene she was predominant. In 2009, both parties lost ground, but CDU more importantly kept the center seat and could finally negotiate a majority coalition with the surging FDP. This matrimony turned out more sour than before, but more importantly destroyed utterly new-made deputy chancellor and foreign minister Guido Westerwelle's Free Democrats, aiming at a more radical completion of the neoliberal economics of the 1990s and finding little support in the broader German population as well as in Merkel's and Schäuble's cautious leadership. But Merkel herself stood, even stronger. And might have got away with it, or even served as the longest chancellor of Germany ever, if not for the sores of the second Großkoalition and particularly since 2015, which cut down the last political giants of the pre-recession period. The 2013 election had served up all but a stable majority for Die Union on its own terms, a historic achievement, and the SPD under Steinbrück's leadership humiliated for a third time. But the collapse of the FDP, nigh but colossal in both relative and real political terms as they lost all their federal seats, enforced yet another ultimately successful, but uneasy coalition that predictably tore at both parties' credibility. The SPD would repeat the horrors of the 2009 campaign, under the banner of dejected, if initially popularised Brussels veteran and prosthetic Nobel laureate Martin Schulz and came to another, even more catastrophic collapse which - in its throes - came to question its position as the predominant opposition party. Merkel was still queen, but the blow had taken hard, survival was all but glorious, and the rise of the Alternative für Deutschland - only just excluded by a tally close to the FDP's in 2013 under a more moderate, academic-supported slate - and natural queasiness of her old liberal bedmates made the matrimony with red yet again the only option fit, if yet not clearly a beacon of the past.

The Greek debt crisis, the paragon of the post-2009 era of intra-European relations and its cruel exposing the uneasy relationship between international relations, popular wills and economic management, soared her record and solidified her position as ostensible leader of Europe, next to a string of increasignly pathetic and hapless one-term French presidents. With the economy of an already unsteady southern Balkan country, the cradle of demoskratia with all its political and cultural implications bent and shrunk by a quarter under a international whip, while voters at home were increasingly unwilling to pay up increasingly expensive rescure solutions and hapless voter-taxpayers of other crisis-stricken countries (such as the Portuguese) unwilling to experience both. The expansion east, beyond the mere political questions of a resurging, evermore authoritarian Russia - problematic for German politicians who had kindled long-standing financial desires to sustain good relations on this frontier - seemed more a mistake and at best an over-excited grab, with the consequences of the 2013-2014 Ukrainian turmoil putting weight on the eastern frontier, while to the south the doorstep of the union affected by the timely stirrings of the Arab world and its fallout. While not as sternly affected as the leaders of Britain and France, whose victories and overreach made them contend with it militarily, the ever-present questions of humanitarian aid, nationality and integration of cultures - condemned from her own mouth as a failure or at any rate failing in 2010, on the eve of the great wave - would haunt her as the spectre of the financial meltdown had not. This crisis, including the building of quasi-Caliphates and a momentous refugee wave, its timing and weight imposed on the European theatre, proved enough to plow domestic politics into turmoil.

The odds, it must be said given this role model, were stacked against her. The circumstances were, in some ways, grimmer. The times were not fit for building titans. And from this perspective, this truth inherited, she did with grace and would end a respected, hardened champion and guardian of an order already considered ossified. Had she ventured to solve the migration crisis with sterner leadership, and perhaps an articulated vision, she could have made a greater name and a reputation. But the call of Wir schaffen das, contravening the Dublin policy. Meanwhile, the internal contradictions and stirrings were strong and for the last term she was forced to accommodate hardline Bavarian Premier Seehofer as minister of the interior, while steering the course to an unarticulated center. In 2017, she stood more vulnerable than ever, but again managed to to steer clear off the rocks, with the opposition in turmoil. The reds and greens would, however chastised, not challenge the government any more than the CSU would abandon it. Whatever her accomplishments, from which could be brandished a stable enduring Sozialwirtschaft upholding to the rule of law and a civil society, was the enduring throne of government whose occupant would remain with the party she had chosen.

Her policies, while reviled from the broader left and any more idealistic, vitriolic embodiment of the right, not really rekindled on the national scene until on her watch, reinvigorated Christian Democracy in a scene where the ultimately collapse of Prussian society values, and the Communist threat, would seem superfluous. While her rule destroyed any partners as well as rivals which ultimately undid her. And yet, she avoided entanglements to either way, with radical post-DDR socialists and radical-nationalists increasingly popular but late in its coming and marginal in the national theatre. Die Union remains strong, with the Greens whose policies she had co-oped rather than blazed as an ever-likely rival, and under its aegis was the question of who would succeed her, however reviled, as the oarsman (or, as it happened, -woman) of the federal republic, and the prospect of a federal Europe. She smashed the patriarch of European Social Democracy without ever playing the tune or ever an allusion to the , and equalled her mentor in the first momentous challenge of the post-Cold War order. And perhaps it would be one day, after her eventual passing, in the wake of unease and hardened opposition that the brand of Mutti would carry something of the nostalgia of a stable and working past.