LOOKING OUT FOR NUMBER EINS
This summer, as the pandemic eases and Europe opens again for business and pleasure, the Merkel era will end. After her 16-year reign as Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel deserves admiration and praise on many counts. When she made history in the fall of 2005 as the first woman to be elected chancellor, unemployment stood at just over 11 percent, and Germany was widely disparaged as the “sick man of Europe.” Doctoral students on both sides of the Atlantic were writing dissertations trying to uncover the roots of Germany’s malaise and were asking what it was about the country that made it so hard to reform. Four Merkel cabinets later, German unemployment stands at 6 percent (and would be even lower if not for the pandemic), and no one doubts Germany’s political, financial, and economic leadership of the European Union.
In an era plagued by erratic and swaggering strongmen like Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Narendra Modi, and Jair Bolsonaro, Merkel provided a model of rational, steadfast leadership. Indeed, in the early years of the Trump presidency, political observers on both sides of the Atlantic were fond of dubbing her the new “leader of the free world.” Merkel always rejected that honorific, even though she has undeniably been the de facto leader of the EU. But what kind of leadership has she provided for the European project?
Many glowing retrospectives on Merkel’s tenure depict her as Europe’s savior—the steady and reliable pair of hands that steered the EU through a series of unprecedented crises. They recount her role over the past decade along the following lines. When the eurozone debt crisis threatened to overwhelm EU institutions, Merkel overcame domestic resistance to negotiate bailouts for the hardest-hit eurozone members, provided political backing for massive European Central Bank liquidity injections, and paved the way for a myriad of new EU institutions, including a sweeping banking union. When Vladimir Putin’s Russia annexed Crimea and intervened militarily in Ukraine’s eastern Donbass region, she kept her cool and took the lead in negotiating the Minsk agreements. During the refugee crisis in the summer of 2015, she showed her humanity—at considerable political
