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This year was tough, it took an infinite amount of energy, as the Chancellor can clearly see in her latest appearances. And that means something about Angela Merkel. Her aura also feeds on the assumption of almost superhuman reservations: when her negotiating partners fall asleep after hours of rounds, Merkel is still completely there, when the others are still asleep, she is already awake again. This reputation has shaped its long-standing chancery.
But Angela Merkel, 66, is simply human after all. And if the nation is on the gums because of Corona, that will also apply to the country’s top crisis manager at some point.
That is the position, nine months before the end of his chancery. The Bundestag elections on September 26 are the irrevocable end to the policy of the CDU, Angela Merkel. He will have ruled for nearly 16 years, just a few months less than Chancellor Helmut Kohl, his former sponsor. The end of an era is near.
Ironically, the biggest burden and challenge in Merkel’s long career has made her more popular than ever before: At the end of the Corona year, her reputation among voters remains high, as current polls show. The vast majority of citizens trust the Chancellor in the fight against the pandemic. The crisis is executive time, and Merkel has been its biggest winner so far.
The success story is increasingly questioned: Did the Chancellor really help Germany to overcome the crisis so well? Compared to other large European countries, the figures still speak in favor of not only virus indicators, but also general economic data.
But Germany is not as lightly as after the first wave. Hundreds of deaths per crown a day? The Chancellor herself expresses her horror almost every time.
Merkel has rarely been seen as pleading as she was recently in the Bundestag, not even so emotionally: “If we have too many contacts before Christmas and then it was last Christmas with grandparents, then we will have missed something!” His voice sounded brittle. as never before. And the Chancellor knows that increasing aid to keep the economy running is now overwhelming even the exuberant state finances.
In her last shift of the year in office, Merkel is going to be a spent chancellor, without whom, however, many do not want to be left without, the closer the parting approaches. Merkel’s weary pre-Crown period, in which there was constant debate over when the government will collapse, early federal elections will be held and thus the chancellor will have to go faster than planned, seems light years away. away.
The latest crisis dwarfs everything
On the other hand, it is increasingly clear that how to deal with this crisis will define Merkel’s chancellery. Fighting the virus puts everything in the shadows, and Merkel has had enough crises to deal with: financial crisis, euro crisis, refugee crisis. Has the current Presidency of the Council of the EU planned as a kind of climax of its chancellery the efforts for a new policy towards China? He vanishes behind Corona. For the first time as Chancellor, Merkel addressed the people in 2020 beyond her New Year’s speech through a television address, with a “blood sweat and consolation speech,” as her SPIEGEL colleague put it, Christiane Hoffmann.
Corona is the end of Merkel.
In recent months, the Chancellor has had to realize how little influence she has as a crisis manager and how much difference there is with public satisfaction. With each meeting of the Prime Minister’s Conference in recent months, it has become clearer how much the heads of government of the 16 federal states have a voice in crisis management.
Merkel’s authority, even in the ranks of the Union, has been significantly reduced. The fact that in the end, with all her admonitions and warnings, she was right with the country’s faltering leaders, and worse, it turned out to be even worse than she feared, does not give Merkel satisfaction, the situation is too dire for that. .
Meanwhile, the head of government is increasingly distancing herself from her party. The political scientist Karl-Rudolf Korte calls her “President of the Chancellor”. Today, Merkel’s popularity has rubbed off on the CDU and CSU. If it remains so popular until the federal elections, the Union parties, regardless of the chancellor candidate, can benefit from it.
Photo: Bogumil Jeziorski / AFP
Then Merkel would finally achieve a tailor-made way out. He would have been the first person in the history of Federal Republicans to voluntarily divorce the Chancellery and, at the same time, would have built a perfect bridge for his successor. However, if your crown balance changes in the remaining nine months, the exact opposite could happen.
But is Merkel still worried about what comes after her?
The Chancellor remains completely on the sidelines of the race for the CDU presidency, which will be decided at the party congress on January 16. His favorite Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer failed as an immediate successor, now the party has to learn to walk on its own, as then-Secretary-General Merkel had already said in 1999 after the donation scandal surrounding President Kohl. That less than nothing could live with Friedrich Merz as successor to the party presidency is obvious, given the difficult relationship between the two.
After the main election, the debate on the chancellor candidacy, combined with the question of whether the head of the CSU, Markus Söder, would not be the most suitable for it anyway. But Merkel will be silent on this, at least in public. And then, in mid-March, the first of six state elections in 2021 is scheduled, starting with Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate. Thuringia will follow in April, Saxony-Anhalt will be elected in June, and in Berlin and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania citizens will vote in their state parliaments at the same time as the federal elections in late September.
Crown will define Merkel’s chancellery
Will Corona finally end in fall? What balance, at least provisional, will be drawn up and what is the first verdict on Merkel’s chancellery? For nine months he has still had it in hand, as far as circumstances allow, prime ministers and political opponents.
And so?
It will just disappear, so difficult to imagine from today’s perspective and after nearly 16 years in office. Merkel is no longer running for the Bundestag and has also ruled out accepting a position in an international organization. Her husband Joachim Sauer retired as a chemistry teacher in 2017. There is plenty to do in the garden of their weekend cottage in Uckermark, for retired fans of opera and theater like the Merkel-Sauer couple, almost limitless possibilities. (if Corona’s situation allows it again).
Last year, the Chancellor told SPIEGEL what she dreamed of as a citizen of the GDR at the time: “Seeing the Rocky Mountains, driving the car and listening to Bruce Springsteen, that was my dream.”
There would be time for that too.
