Merkel heads into final years as indispensable leader without vision

Given she has been in power for 15 years, chancellor Angela Merkel was in flying – if sombre – form on Wednesday in the German Bundestag.

With a record 590 Covid-19 deaths in one 24-hour period, she begged people to reduce contacts in the Advent season – or realise too late that “this Christmas was the last one with the grandparents”.

Amid last-lap Brexit talks Merkel signalled, as the de facto EU leader she has become, that the bloc was “prepared to go down a path without a trade deal” if the British made demands detrimental to the single market.

In a powerful address that ran the gamut from typical technocratic sobriety to unusual emotional appeals, the chancellor demonstrated why she remains Europe’s essential leader. But, by her own decision not to seek a fifth term, she is a leader with less than a year left in office.

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Then at lunchtime word leaked that Merkel and her German EU presidency team had struck a compromise with Warsaw and Budapest. This was crucial given a link between Covid-19 emergency assistance and a new rule-of-law mechanism to punish countries who undermine key EU values such as the separation of powers – as critics say Poland and Hungary have, egregiously.

“She worked personally and intensively on the Hungary/Poland issue over weeks,” a senior Merkel official told The Irish Times.

From the euro crisis via the refugee crisis and on to today’s multiple crises, the EU’s fallback position in the last years has been clear: in case of emergency, dial M for Merkel.

“People like to simplify and personalise complexity, and project things on to her, but she has turned the political compromise into a fine art,” said Hardy Ostry, head of the Brussels office of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation , linked to Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU).

He senses a restlessness around Brussels over the looming post-Merkel era, exacerbated by how her CDU party, a major player in the European People’s Party parliamentary bloc, remains leaderless as it heads into a federal election year.

“Having no successor in the starting blocks, no idea who’s coming, makes the mood around Merkel’s departure very unusual, “ said Ostry.

Not everyone is mourning the looming end of the Merkel era in Berlin. While most acknowledge the chancellor’s unerring ability to snatch political compromise from the jaws of defeat, others despair at what they call her tactical approach trapped by its own short-termism.

“Merkel’s success has always drawn on creating the illusion that she has a secret plan in her pocket,” said Josef Janning, a political scientist in Berlin. “But in mastering crises, she’s never used them to advance European integration in any substantial form, it’s always piecemeal engineering.”

Kohl warning

His words echo a decade-old warning from the late Helmut Kohl, that it was unclear to its EU partners “where Germany stands and where it wants to go”. While Dr Merkel hit back that “each era has its specific challenges”, the late unity chancellor’s words still chime with some analysts in Berlin.

Analyst Roderick Parkes jokes that the Covid crisis was a gift to Berlin’s six-month EU presidency as it allowed German officials adopt their preferred role of European facilitators – rather than representatives of the EU’s largest member state, with obligations to shape a clear road map for the EU’s post-Brexit future.

“Crisis has become Germany’s comfort zone because it allows them abdicate wider responsibility for big European thinking and proper politics,” said Parkes, programme head of the Oppenheim Centre for European Studies. “We’ve had 10 years of this euro crisis mentality, during which Europe in the world becomes smaller and smaller.”

At another crisis meeting of EU leaders on Thursday, most in the room can agree that Merkel has an unrivalled grasp of detail and always remains professional in negotiations.

But as a German leader in Europe, Albrecht von Lucke of Berlin political journal Blätter argues that Merkel “has never led from the front in Europe, only ever reacted to events”.

“One reason she stands out in Europe is because her peers have been so mediocre,” he said. “The current Covid plays to her strengths as a scientist, but distracts from the fact that she will leave behind a far more deeply divided EU.”