Will much-maligned ‘Mutti’ Merkel have last laugh?

Travelling around Germany during the 2021 election campaign, I was immediately struck by two things. The first was the critical and depressed mood that had gained a hold, as though nothing — from community relations to the railways — was going right. The second was how universally the blame was being attached to Angela Merkel, who was retiring as chancellor after 16 years.

The bleakness marked quite a change from even a year before, and an even greater change from the previous election four years earlier, when Merkel had won her fourth victory as head of the centre-right CDU, and the CDU-CSU alliance. Now, she was not only bowing out but her party lost dozens of seats, opening the way for the Social Democrats under Olaf Scholz to bring a precarious “traffic-light” coalition — of red, green and yellow (free-market liberals) — to power.

My abiding memory of that campaign was seeing Merkel arrive at a campaign rally in her constituency, the Baltic city of Stralsund, to support her successor as CDU leader and bid her farewells. It was dark, cold and pouring with rain, and the crowd gathered in the historic city square greeted their MP, who had become a world stateswoman, with heckling and boos.

Once out of power, “Mutti”, as she was nicknamed by her countrymen, has suffered what must be one of the most dramatic eclipses of any recent democratic leader, anywhere. Having chosen to retreat gracefully from political life, she was ruthlessly written out of the public script. Where her name was mentioned, she was vilified — blamed for the parlous state of Germany and then for the Russia-Ukraine war.

This week, she swept back into the limelight, with a slew of interviews and a live presentation marking the publication of her memoirs, a 700-plus-page brick of a book called Freedom. Tickets to the presentation-cum-launch in Berlin sold out in minutes.

Angela Merkel, nonetheless, feels like a figure from a past age, so much has changed since she left office. That distance, however, is one reason why her chancellorship needs to be revisited. Too much is currently being seen through today’s rear-view mirror. Merkel’s defence — which is how her memoirs are being read — needs to be listened to and learnt from. Here are just three, of many, examples.

Germany remains, in many ways, a divided country. It is too rarely recalled that when Merkel was designated successor to Helmut Kohl, the giant of German reunification, it was an almost miraculous case of cometh the hour, cometh the woman. Merkel, who had grown up in East Germany in a pastor’s family, studied chemistry and became politically engaged as the regime collapsed, had the consummate profile for the times. Elected an MP in 1990, she rose to become opposition leader before taking the CDU-CSU back into power, by a hair’s breadth, in 2005.

A better-qualified chancellor Germany could not have had: one with a sensibility towards the particular grievances of the former East, a scientist’s grasp of energy sources and climate (and, later, pandemics) and the skills of a practised conciliator. Doubters gave her coalition only months; she was to win three more elections.

In her book, Merkel reveals — and remains angered by — the distrust she encountered as an “Ossi”, including times when her loyalty not just to the CDU but to the country was questioned, even by political colleagues. With Germany’s East-West divide resurfacing again, as a resentful East seeks solace in the far right, this poses the question as to how much wider that gap might be, had Germany not had a chancellor in those crucial years who understood and tried to bridge that divide.

Second, the economy, where Merkel is held responsible by many for Germany’s decline and is blamed for letting the country rest on its laurels rather than capitalising on its assets. And it is true that in digital developments especially, Germany has followed rather than led. Rarely included in the equation, however, is the massive and continuing cost of unification that Germany bore largely alone. Probably no other country could have made such transfers from one part of the country to another without precipitating perhaps violent unrest.

It is true that, by 2021, Germany was feeling the strain, and there was an immediate cost to its flight from nuclear power in response to Japan’s Fukushima disaster, a hasty decision that in my book (though not in hers...) was a mistake. But the sharpest, most catastrophic, damage to Germany’s economy cannot be laid at Merkel’s door.

It is a direct result of the much-lauded Zeitenwende — sea-change, epochal shift, however you translate it — declared by Scholz after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Germany ceased its reliance on Russian gas, mothballing a completed new gas pipeline and triggering substantially higher prices to households and, more crucially, to industry. Scholz also shifted resources to the military. This has been a colossal shock to the system that hugely compounded the inherited inertia.

Which is where a third, and perhaps the most contentious, defence of Merkel must come in: for her dealings with Russia and Vladimir Putin, the Russian president throughout her time in office. So virulent has the criticism been in this regard that it sometimes seems as though she alone is being held responsible for the Ukraine war. Among her misjudgements — to some, crimes — are a weakness for cheaper Russian energy, “appeasement” of Putin over his 2014 annexation of Crimea and intervention in Ukraine’s east, and her strong opposition to Nato membership for Ukraine, which helped to block plans by the US and others to speed its accession.

Merkel’s general response to these charges, which she made in one of her first interviews after leaving office, was to look directly at the interviewer and say: “But there wasn’t a war, was there?” And of all the defences she could make, this is surely the most compelling.

However, there were reasons why there was no war. She and Putin spoke each other’s languages; over many meetings, she clearly had the measure of the man; she kept calm, she kept channels open, and she hoped, perhaps as a child of Cold War Ostpolitik, that trade could foster change.

Merkel also understood one thing from early on, that for Ukraine to join Nato was the reddest of red lines for Putin, and could mean war. Had Nato agreed Ukraine’s membership in 2008, Merkel argues, today’s war would simply have broken out sooner.

It is pure coincidence that Merkel’s memoirs — more, I am pleased to say, defiant defence than mea culpa — see the light of day as another election looms, following the sudden collapse of the Scholz coalition. And Germans may not be ready to reassess a politician so many consigned so quickly to oblivion and infamy. But her reasoned account of why she did what she did — and how peace was kept — may be treated more charitably by a new generation now plunged into the conflict and division she spent her chancellorship trying to avoid.