How Angela Merkel became Europe’s most powerful woman
I first felt the wrath of Angela Merkel in a Berlin sushi bar a decade ago. From that moment I was reduced to stalking her.
I first felt the wrath of Angela Merkel in a Berlin sushi bar a decade or so ago. On the line was her petulant spokesman: “The chancellor, the Bundeskanzlerin, is so deeply disappointed.” The previous day we had conducted an on-the-record interview with the German leader; she had been distracted, fiddled with her phone and said little. Her one newsworthy comment had been about the euro and we published it straight away rather than hang around for a week while her spin doctors excised anything from the story that risked being interesting. Under the pernicious process of “authorisation”, German politicians give themselves the right to unsay things they have said on tape.
I tried to explain about 24-hour news cycles, the sanctity of the spoken word, the utter absence of controversy in the interview, but there was no holding him. “The chancellor believes this to be unacceptable behaviour. This will be the last interview for a very long time.” And that was it: I had been banished. From that moment I was reduced to stalking Angela. Metaphorically, of course.
Over the past 13 years as chancellor of Germany, the 64-year-old has created a court that rewards zipped-up loyalty over merit and resents intrusion and criticism. Today the cronies are worse than they have ever been, because they see their chief function as being to protect her (and their own) legacy, rather than free her hands to make shrewd policy decisions. They have become myth-makers.
Expelled from the Merkelsphere, I had to find an indirect approach, a way of constructing a picture of her without her co-operation. As a start there were chatty members of the Social Democratic and Free Democratic parties, politicians who had been in coalition with her but who were not fettered by the curse that had made me persona non grata. They had helped in her makeover, taught her how to stand and when it was good to smile, the colour-coding of her blazers. Orange blazers for international summits, so she could stand out in the group mugshot of blue-suited men; green was safe, but also a sign of commitment to climate change. Never red with Vladimir Putin; never apricot with Donald Trump lest it clash with his skin tone.
Some Merkel-watchers were fascinated by her braininess — neither of her conservative predecessors, Helmut Kohl and Konrad Adenauer, had her kind of intellect. On one holiday, she took for her get-away-from-it-all reading the works of the Stalin-era economist Nikolai Kondratiev. On her 60th birthday in 2014, she invited her friends to a lecture by historian Jürgen Osterhammel on how Europe and Asia saw each other in the 19th century. What made her substantially different from other European leaders — Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, four French presidents; she has outstayed them all — was her deep seriousness. Where did this moral stamina come from?
Four years ago on a trip back to Germany I found myself in church with her and caught a glimpse of what marks her out. It was the Maria Magdalene church in her home town of Templin. Merkel veterans had told me it would be an important moment. The town was the one place where she felt truly safe. It was the church where she had been confirmed as a Protestant. It was Reformation Day, the day Martin Luther nailed up his challenges to the church and kicked off a theological revolution. Her father, Horst Kasner, had preached there and she wanted to say something from the heart about responsibility towards the refugees who were already starting to pour in from the Syrian war. And about the complexities of being a Christian and a leader. It was the closest I have heard to a soul-searching exercise by a serving leader.
“God doesn’t want marionettes or robots,” she told the congregation. People had to make considered decisions, not just do what they were told or swallow received opinion. As a leader she recognised she was imperfect; all she could do was to take seriously each issue confronting her. One of the parishioners asked if they should be giving arms to the Kurds — what about Christian pacifism? “We’re helping them to help others,” she said, but not in a glib way. “We can’t pretend that these wars have nothing to do with us.” She had thought it through, as a Realpolitiker, as a former scientist and as a Christian. And what to do about those refugees who were pouring in from war zones, crossing Balkan borders into the European Union? I still have my scrawled notes of her response: “Nobody feels good about this, not about sending them back because they don’t qualify for asylum. But Germany can’t take in all the poor and desperate.”
That phrase was to come back to haunt her when she eventually did open the borders and allow about one million refugees and migrants into the country. The decision led indirectly to a surge in the far right and the splintering of German politics; it has often been described as an impulse, a moment of reckless generosity. But Merkel in church that Friday was already in the midst of a thought process that would change European politics. The questions haunt her. What does it mean to be a German in a global world? Where do German responsibilities begin and end? How does a leader faced with an impossible choice between offering help to the needy and placing strain on her own citizens retain her moral compass?
Templin is 80km from Berlin, at the end of a traintrack that runs through woodland and scruffy fields — the left-behindness of the former East Germany. Her mother, Herlind Kasner, a former languages teacher, still lives there. All the significant pitstops of Merkel’s pre-political life are within its medieval walls or just outside. Although it does not make a fuss of its former pupil, her school has pinned up a very Merkelian set of rules: “Everybody here has equal rights whether German or foreign, from town or country, strong or weak. We talk openly about our problems and help others. We do not tolerate physical or psychological violence … Class begins promptly at 07.25.”
Merkel lived on a campus for people with learning and physical disabilities because her father’s rectory was on the grounds. Since he was a priest in a communist country and had moved from Hamburg in West Germany to do the job, young Angela was regarded as a bit of a freak. Much later, when she became leader of Germany’s conservative Christian Democratic Union, her former schoolmates joked cruelly that she had always been a member of a different kind of CDU — the Club der Ungeküssten, the Club of the Unkissed. Boys were put off by her sharpness, her otherness, her strong willpower. A famous story has her in a school swimming lesson, standing on a high diving board, gathering the courage to make the jump with the rest of the class giggling below. In the end, when the bell rang and the class filed out, she took the plunge.
I talked to three of her near-contemporaries in Templin and each interpreted this parable of power differently. One said it showed she calculates every risk permutation before making a decision, even if there is pressure to act, another that she had deliberately made herself the centre of attention. Perhaps the most insightful perspective came from someone in the church community: “She was terrified of embarrassing herself in front of the others, unsure of how her body would react when it hit the water — but she overcame these fears and chose her moment.” I like the latter explanation because it suggests that she is a master of timing, one of the qualities that have nudged her to the top.
The enclosed town must have seemed like a manageable oasis in communism. In the north-east, unlike Dresden in the south, it was possible to pick up West German television with ease and so those who wanted to could entertain two competing realities. The Kasners, who had relatives in the West, received packages with jeans and fashionable clothing for Angela and her younger siblings, Markus and Irene. Angela had hoped the clothes would make her more popular; instead, when she moved to grammar school, they drew attention to her outsider status.
As a Lutheran pastor, her father was an object of interest for the Stasi, not least because he ran seminars that sometimes ended in discussions about the meaning of life in a society that marginalised God. Horst Kasner appears to have strung along the informers. He learnt how to make public statements about the need to work within the rules of socialism while also acting as a below-the-radar dissident. His eldest child learnt from this. She had a mildly rebellious streak, smoking in the woods with schoolmates, picking up the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine album on a trip to Russia. But she also joined the Free German Youth, the communist youth wing. At one stage this ability to hide her true feelings attracted the attention of a Stasi recruiting team. Her mother had told her that, if the time came, she should tell the Stasi she was a blabbermouth, incapable of keeping a secret. As Merkel tells it, that worked and they stopped pestering her. Still, she told an early biographer, Evelyn Roll, “The greatest thing you learnt from living in East Germany was how to stay silent.”
Was it as simple as that? What if Merkel, promoted by Helmut Kohl in unified Germany, had been more involved with the Stasi in the old days?
I went for a long walk up the Drachenfels, the rocky outpost overlooking the Rhine, with one of her party colleagues. “Look into the Stasi connection,” he told me. “There’s something in it. How could she be interviewed by Stasi recruiters and there be no record? Since when would they be fobbed off with such a simplistic explanation?” That was, I think, partly the paranoia of a West German politico who had grown up with the fear of reds under the bed. But it wasn’t entirely crazy: an old Stasi analyst (a neighbour of mine in Berlin) also explained that a priest’s family would have been put under much greater pressure to inform and collaborate. So how did Merkel just drift away from it all?
It’s true, there is no paper trail, but any ties with the defunct police state have long since become irrelevant. Merkel left Templin because it was too small and it really was impossible to keep a secret. She chose instead to study physics in Leipzig. There she met Ulrich Merkel, a fellow student who was to become her first husband. It took her only a few years to grow bored with him. Without any great discussion she dumped him, returning to the apartment to take the washing machine when he was out. They divorced in 1982. It was 16 years before she married again, to the scientist Joachim Sauer.
If you have grown up in one political system, watch it die, and then rise to the top of another, you understand the principle of the clean break. That, apart from her fluency in Russian, has given her a shrewd insight into Vladimir Putin. And it encouraged her to dispose of those East German friends who could become a political embarrassment. When she left the flat she shared with her husband she was given a sofa by Hans-Jürgen von Osten, a friend from her time in the Free German Youth. Years later, as she rose in the CDU, she cold-shouldered him. When a good friend who shared an office with her in a Berlin scientific institute turned out to be a Stasi informer — his reports showed that he had never seriously betrayed her — she disavowed the friendship, acknowledging only that they had a “personal acquaintanceship”. Both the friend, Michael Schindhelm (now a theatre director in Switzerland), and Merkel know this was not the case. Her aim: to shield herself from any flanking attack. “It’s as if she has constructed a suit of armour,” said a diplomat who worked in her office. “Maybe everyone in the business does this, but she goes further. She inspects it for chinks every day.”
At first her male rivals did not understand her steeliness. In the early days of Kohl’s patronage when she was rising to junior ministerial office — a woman, a divorcée, young, non-Catholic and East German, she ticked all the boxes for a leader mimicking an interest in modernising the party — she accepted without demur his designation of her as “my girl”. On a campaign bus, he leant over and asked her what the people in the east had thought of him. Merkel did not know how to answer honestly. Most easterners had made their judgment by illegally watching West German television, and the western channels mocked him as a pear-shaped provincial oaf. Eventually she replied: they think of you as a great historical figure. Kohl was pleased.
She rose under his mentorship until she publicly denounced his slack and corrupt leadership. “It was Vatermord — patricide,” a former CDU apparatchik told me. “He never forgave her.” Long after, Kohl’s loyalists would spend evenings in Capriccio, one of his favourite Berlin restaurants, complaining about Merkel’s betrayal and her ruthless shift to the left.
I heard a similar whine in Social Democrat and Free Democrat watering holes, and the common theme was that Merkel was doomed to fail since she did not have the necessary presence. Germany was too big for balance, too small for predominance; it could not be led from behind. It demanded a heavy-weight, someone self-confident who could outstare the American, French and Russian leaders. The subtext: leading Germany was a job for a man.
Merkel understood quickly what she was up against. Men underestimated her, especially those who had plotted their way up through the provinces. One political baron after another tripped themselves up. Critics used the phrase “phlegm fatale”. In fact, she knew she could always count on male vanity. Merkel studied and then largely rejected the lessons of Margaret Thatcher. Whereas Thatcher favoured men in her cabinet over women, knowing she had to co-opt politicians from clubbable, conspiratorial Westminster, Merkel created a parallel female universe. Her powerful office was controlled by female gatekeepers. For a while she attended the Berlin salons of solely female journalists. I debriefed one after an evening session at the home of television presenter Sabine Christiansen. “Merkel really let loose against the male cabals and it rang a chord in all of us,” said my informant. “All of us, from left and right, got what she was up against, but we had all devised our own coping mechanisms.”
Merkel’s East German state may have broken down, but she was in sympathy with its treatment of women: near-equality in the workplace (although rarely at the very top levels); a school system that catered for working women; liberal abortion laws. These were anathema to her party, with its Catholic and socially conservative voter base. She could count on generational change, on more adventurous voters, Merkel told her female admirers in the press corps, but she would need their support. And of course to stay in power for a generation.
But she did not attempt to reinvent the political wheel. At the beginning of her career, when she was a lowly spokeswoman for a fringe East German dissident group, Merkel was advised to ditch her Jesus sandals and wraparound skirts. As a minister, before going on a foreign trip, she was advised by Kohl’s wife on the kind of blue she should wear. A CDU colleague, Michelle Schreyer, introduced her to the trouser suit in the ’90s. One of Berlin’s top hairdressers put an end to her Joan of Arc helmet. Studio make-up artists learnt to disguise eyes drooping from lack of sleep. Merkel gritted her teeth and played by the antiquated rules.
The Merkel women’s club fell away with time. Now at court she prefers male eunuchs who are disinclined to question her judgment. She has friends in the cabinet, including defence minister Ursula von der Leyen, but they are not there because of the sisterhood or unspoken quotas. Merkel judges on performance and the appearance of political authenticity; anything else, she has decided, makes women look weaker, not stronger.
In 13 years at the helm she has, in any case, broken the back of male-centred resistance. Today, her most vulnerable position — the one destined to shorten her reign — is the result of the failure of many local communities to integrate the refugees and migrants that entered the country between 2014 and 2016, along with that of the mainstream parties, including her own, to make a compelling case for a multicultural society. The hostility to refugees is evenly balanced between women and men. Many were alienated from her open-door policy when, on New Year’s Eve 2015, a crowd of frustrated young men, many of them asylum seekers, groped and assaulted women outside Cologne station. When the incident was hushed up for reasons of political correctness, support for the far right soared.
The bill for all this arrived at the federal elections last year: she led her CDU party to a dreadful result, barely 33 per cent. Merkel drew the right conclusion and stepped down as party leader. In her stead is another woman, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, who has predictably been dubbed “Mini-Merkel”. Yet to win back votes, Mini-Merkel will have to distance herself from her patron and get tougher on migration. Merkel has promised to serve as chancellor until 2021 but she is unlikely to last that long. Germans appreciate much of what she has done, but on migration she has lost their trust.
The chancellor is looking very lonely, lonelier than I have ever known her. When I saw her in the Templin church four years ago, she had reached what she thought was a balanced decision — let in the needy, but only those who complied with the rules, in numbers that would not break society.
Later, she found herself in a galloping crisis and bowed to another strand of her Christian instinct: to persuade Germans they had enough wealth to share with hundreds of thousands of newcomers in the hope that the rest of Europe would follow their example. She failed to make the case and seemed to have lost her bearings. Then, as society found the swelling numbers too much to swallow, she did another U-turn and allowed German authorities to deport the unwanted at a faster rate. As a result, she has lost her quiet sense of certainty. Power is ebbing away. Today, up close, she looks almost relieved.