How Merkel turned back clock of German history

Angela Merkel has long had her admirers in the Anglophone media. In November 2015 the Economist called her “the indispensable European.” A month later the Financial Times named her its “person of the year.” Time magazine proclaimed her “chancellor of the free world.” When Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, the New York Times dubbed Merkel “the liberal West’s Last Defender.”
I confess, I have never quite seen her that way. My one encounter with Angela Merkel was in Spain during an early phase of the Eurozone crisis. It was February 2011 and I happened to be in Madrid, where I was trying to work out just how close to collapse the European banking system was. I was between meetings with officials at the central bank and finance ministry when, walking with a swiftness rarely seen in Madrid’s
corridors of power, the German chancellor and her entourage arrived for a meeting with the hapless socialist prime minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero.
I had never before seen a politician behave with such canine deference as Zapatero did when Merkel entered the room. It puzzled me at first, because the German chancellor does not look at all commanding. The word journalists cannot resist when describing her is “frumpy.”
And yet I discerned within a few minutes her subtly intimidating aura. Angela Merkel does not suffer fools gladly. Indeed, she struck me as having a low tolerance of even quite smart people. Tracey Ullman does by far the best Merkel impersonation. But Merkel often treats her inner circle to her own spoofs of other leaders (the former French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, was a favorite target).
Vladimir Putin, by contrast, let his dog do the intimidation at one of their meetings, consciously exploiting Merkel’s fear of dogs. But a former ministerial colleague once told me that, privately, Merkel was rather impressed by Putin. After his famously menacing speech at the 2007 Munich Security Conference, when he attacked the “unipolar order” dominated by the United States, she was publicly impassive. Backstage, her comment was: “Cool speech!” (“geile Rede!”).
That is not, of course, how German voters see her. The appeal of “Mutti” is of someone who has no real interest in power, but who governs purely in order to provide her people with the thing they crave above all else: stability. Asked once what the word “Germany” inspired in her, she replied: “Pretty,
airtight windows” (“schöne dichte Fenster”).
Having spent the first
35 years of her life in the German Democratic Republic, Merkel not unreasonably names as her favourite movie “The Legend of Paul and Paula,” a whimsical East German production released in 1973 (but directed in the French cinematic style of 1968) about two star-crossed lovers in East Berlin. At one point in the film Paula says to Paul: “We’ll let it last as long as it lasts. We’ll do nothing to stop it and nothing to help it.” That rather sums up the strangely passive love affair between the Germans and their leader.
The voters have never given Merkel the resounding mandates that British voters once gave Margaret Thatcher. For most of her time in office — three out of four terms — she has been obliged to govern in fractious grand coalitions with the Social Democrats. And yet she has been chancellor for 16 years — five years longer than Thatcher was Britain’s prime minister, though short of Bismarck’s 19 years in office.
During Merkel’s reign, there have been four American presidents, four French, five British prime ministers, eight Italian and eight
Japanese. As with Paula and Paul, it has lasted longer than expected.
To understand Merkel’s appeal, one must go back in time to the period before Bismarck forged the fragmented German lands into an empire — to the era when the Germans saw themselves as they once again see themselves today: as strangers to power. In 1841 Robert Sabatky portrayed the “deutsche Michel” — Germany’s answer to John Bull — as the naive victim of unscrupulous neighbours, who picked his pockets and stole the shirt off his back. Time and again during the Eurozone crisis, I was reminded of this image. And the more I thought about it, the more I began to see that Angela Merkel was the reincarnation of Michel: die deutsche Merkel, in fact.
According to German economists such as Hans-Werner Sinn, the crisis had a simple explanation. While the virtuous German Michel toiled away, reforming his labour market, controlling his unit labor costs and balancing his budget, less scrupulous peripheral countries gorged themselves on the cheap euro credit made available to them by their banks thanks to the monetary union.
When the crisis struck, the question was whether or not the European Central Bank (ECB) and other European agencies ought to bail out the “peripheral” countries at the expense of the savers and taxpayers of the “core.” Many Germans sympathised with (even if they didn’t quite follow) Sinn’s argument that the way the ECB supported the peripheral economies through its TARGET2 settlement system amounted to a covert “transfer union.” What the Southern Europeans needed to do was what Germany had done after 2003: to reduce their price and wage levels, and thereby regain domestic competitiveness. This was a constant refrain in the German press.

—Bloomberg

Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He was previously a professor of history at Harvard, New York University and Oxford. He is the founder and managing director of Greenmantle LLC. His
latest book is “Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe”