Germany after Merkel
National Review, September 30, 2021 (October 18, 2021 issue)
The coalition-building that follows a German election can take quite some time, but regardless of who becomes the country’s next chancellor (almost certainly the Social Democratic Party’s Olaf Scholz), one thing is undeniable: The descent of the center-right CDU/CSU to its lowest-ever share of the vote puts two defining characteristics of outgoing chancellor Angela Merkel — tactical brilliance and strategic blindness — into uncomfortable perspective.
Great leaders take on the consensus; Merkel’s talent lies only in identifying it. Since first becoming chancellor in 2005, she steadily outmaneuvered the SPD by sliding leftward into territory that the Social Democrats had once called their own. It was a move that owed little or nothing to ideology and everything to a determination to hang on to her job. Tactically, it was a triumph, but with Merkel (whose personal approval rating now stands at around 80 percent) having decided not to run again, it left the center-Right with a problem. With not too much to distinguish themselves (most notably in the case of the CDU) politically from the SPD — at least on the surface — they needed a candidate persuasive enough to retain the support of those who had been brought into the fold by “Mutti” Merkel’s mysterious charisma rather than by anything in their platform. Armin Laschet was not that candidate.
More broadly, Merkel’s approach had moved Germany’s Overton Fenster in a direction that no one on the right should appreciate. Scholz himself appears to be firmly in the SPD’s center-left tradition, but that is not so with some of those behind him. And the adverse consequences of Merkelism stretch far beyond politics. Germany’s persistently high tax rates are one legacy of Merkel’s instinct that the middle ground was the right place to be.
On the economic front, Merkel has been fortunate. Her SPD predecessor, Gerhard Schröder, had put in place labor-market reforms designed to improve German productivity. Those, reinforced by lucrative export opportunities in a rapidly expanding China, as well as by the boost to Germany’s competitive advantage from the disguised devaluation that arose from exchanging the deutsche mark, an intrinsically strong currency, for the weaker euro, provided the country with the foundations for years of healthy growth. It also presented Germany with the temptation to coast — a temptation to which, under Merkel, it succumbed. The results were then exacerbated by chronic underinvestment in infrastructure, which has made a substantial contribution to the country’s notorious failure to keep pace with the digital revolution.
Fiscal discipline is a rare virtue, but Germany has taken it too far. What looked like prudence was in fact reckless, given China’s growing industrial sophistication (which has not only increased its self-sufficiency but also elevated it as a competitor) and the rising challenge to German industry posed by both digitization and climate policies both at home and abroad. Traditional German engineering expertise could well count for little in the electric-vehicle era. This could hurt, particularly for smaller suppliers to the auto sector, which, directly or indirectly, accounts for around 10 percent of Germany’s GDP.
Making matters worse, Merkel’s Energiewende — a bid to simultaneously wean the country off fossil fuels and nuclear energy — has burdened Germany, and thus its industry, with the highest electricity costs in the world. Merkel’s responsibility for Germany’s grotesquely expensive and, in terms of greenhouse-gas reduction, distinctly unimpressive dash to renewables might perhaps be put down to the inability of any one leader to hold back the hysteria in Western Europe, let alone deep-green Germany, over climate change. However, Merkel’s decision to accelerate the phaseout (one she had earlier slowed down) of Germany’s nuclear-power stations — which had supplied roughly 30 percent of the country’s energy in 2000 — in the wake of panic over the Fukushima disaster is a showcase for the way she has regularly placed short-term political expediency over the longer-term national interest. As a physicist by training, Merkel was well positioned to make the argument for nuclear power — tellingly, she chose not to.
Over time, the Energiewende has led to a dangerous reliance on Russia, which now supplies around 40 percent of Germany’s natural gas. This has created a dependence that helps explain why Merkel was prepared to traduce Ukraine by agreeing to the completion of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. That stance was difficult to reconcile with her supposed role as “leader of the free world” — a title that, to be fair, she disavowed — but then so was her attempt to lead the European Union into a closer trade relationship with China. Xi’s concentration camps might have been expected to make a German leader pause, but her attitude toward a deal with Huawei only confirmed that genocide is not a deal-breaker. Something similar can be said of Merkel’s willingness to largely go along with Germany’s neglect of NATO and with the introduction of a social-media law so harsh that it was emulated in Russia, albeit with infinitely more malign intent.
Merkel’s adventures in Germany’s “near abroad” (to borrow a not entirely inappropriate Russian phrase), the EU, have also been marked by the lack of any strategic vision. She is not to blame for the euro or its innate structural flaws. However, all too typically, she dodged making the difficult decision she should have taken when the inevitable crisis struck. The best methods of reconciling her twin objectives of saving the euro while preventing the euro zone’s transformation into a “transfer union” (in which its more frugal north subsidized the euro zone’s laggards) would have been either to cut the euro zone’s weakest members loose or to have split the euro into “northern” and “southern” units. These options would have been risky and in all probability expensive, but they would have been preferable to the course she eventually set for the euro zone: bailouts and the accompanying austerity that preserved a procrustean currency but ruined the lives of millions. And even this victory — if that’s the word — will, in the end, prove to be Pyrrhic. The Brussels ratchet is what it is.
Merkel’s commitment to a more closely integrated EU is one limited by her insistence that it should be run on German lines, especially when it comes to the question of living within its means. Nevertheless, in 2009 she was sufficiently communautaire to force through the Lisbon Treaty as a device to enact the proposed EU constitution that had previously been felled by two key referenda. That Merkel would set out to bypass voters in this way was evidence of an authoritarian strain (the social-media law was another) that has revealed itself rather too often.
Opinions differ over whether Britain’s quitting was a good thing for the EU, but there can be no doubt that the Lisbon Treaty played an important part in setting the U.K. on the path to Brexit — a path made even easier by the euro zone’s prolonged agony and then by Merkel’s unilateral decision to suspend the EU’s Dublin procedure on asylum seekers and open Germany’s doors during the migrant crisis, less than a year before the Brexit vote. Even after all that, Brexit was approved only by a narrow margin: If Merkel had indulged British prime minister David Cameron with a spot of even mildly convincing pre-referendum kabuki, Brexit would, quite possibly, have been voted down. Indeed, if any one EU politician was responsible for Brexit, it was Merkel. In 2015, The Economist described her as the “indispensable European,” in no small part because of her behavior during the migrant crisis. That may or may not have been true (spoiler: it was not), but she was certainly the indispensable, if accidental, Brexiteer.
The conclusion (so far) of the migrant crisis was that 890,000 refugees and other migrants arrived in Germany in 2015, followed by a much smaller number the next year (after an about-turn by Berlin), furnishing final confirmation of what had long been obvious. Whatever its people may have wanted, and however much its governments had, against all the evidence, denied it, Germany had become a Migrationsland. And for what? In the meantime, this influx completed the transformation of AfD from a Euroskeptic Professorenpartei into post-war Germany’s most successful party of the nationalist-populist Right, a Merkel legacy that must disappoint her bien-pensant fans.
In addition, Merkel’s agreeing to the admission of so many incomers, which was probably prompted by a combination of her Lutheranism (she is the daughter of a Lutheran pastor), moral narcissism, and, once again, panic, opened fault lines within the EU that have yet to close. Her actions were seen, not without reason, as having attracted even more migrants to Europe, and her attempts to insist on resettlement quotas for refugees throughout the union only added to the resentment she had stirred up. That later efforts to deal with the influx have relied heavily on Turkey’s cooperation have meant that Recep Tayyip Erdogan is, along with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, one of three authoritarian leaders on whom all or part of the EU has become all too dependent, something hard to square with its noisy pronouncements on the importance of “European values.”
Put all this together, and the praise for Merkel that has accompanied her upcoming departure looks absurd. But in the continent of the blind . . .