Merkel - going out with a bang or a whimper?

I used to follow the German political news fairly closely, partly as a way of staying in touch with my personal "History of things that never happened" - I decided way back in the 60s I was going to emigrate to Berlin, which I fell in love with during the Cold War days. And partly because I was so fed up with American politics that I found it uplifting to observe what appeared to be a well-oiled political machine, by comparison.

That has become less and less the case, alas. I'm still fed up with the American machine, which sometimes doesn't seem to work at all anymore. But the German machine ain't what she used to be, either.

Does everything have to fall apart?

My friend Jürgen surprised me some years ago by telling me he was a supporter of Angela Merkel. My reaction at the time was astonishment. "But she's such a machine politician!" I think I said when he told me. "Yes," he said. "But she makes the machine work better than anybody else in government."

Jürgen seems to have lost some of his enthusiasm. He just linked me to an article in Die Zeit, one of Germany's news sources of record by one of Germany's leading journalists, Bernd Ulrich, section chief of Die Zeit's political division.

Ulrich has a history of going for the throat of Germany's politicians for withholding information and for being afraid to take up difficult topics, and this article, "Bevor da was verdirbt (Before something goes to ruin)" shows him true to form.  

Ulrich begins by bewailing the fact that after an impressive fourteen-year chancellorship, Angela’s ways of running the show aren’t working anymore. In fact, he says, things are falling apart all around her. First it was the Socialist Party that suffered the loss of its base support. Now it’s the Union Parties, the partnership between the Christian Democrats (CDU) and their sister party in Bavaria, the Christian Socialists (CSU), that’s coming to pieces. And why? Because in the East (he’s talking specifically about Thuringia) some of their party colleagues in the state (Land) government are toying with creating a coalition government with a fascist. And Ulrich uses that word. 

Unlike in the U.S., where we have two parties, take them or leave them, Germany runs on a parliamentary system where support is spread among several parties who have to form coalitions in order to gain the authority required for running the government. Until recently, nobody in the traditional parties - least of all the moderately conservative establishment CDU - would ever consider the Alternative for Germany (AfD) Party, a nationalistic anti-immigrant party, as a potential partner. But the AfD has seen such a rapid rise in popularity in the East in recent years, that even though this development is alarming progressives in Germany and wherever else progressives are paying attention to politics on the world stage, such a coalition has moved, at least in Thuringia (where Weimar is located), from the unthinkable to the thinkable.

It's not just Merkel facing challenges within the CDU. The Minister of Defense and Merkel’s successor at the CDU, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, is at loggerheads with Heiko Maas, the Foreign Minister, over how to deal with the crisis in Syria. AKK, according to Ulrich, just isn’t ready to take over. She is unprepared and her plans are not well thought through. As for Maas, he’s over in Turkey kissing the butt of the autocratic Erdogan government as a way, says Ulrich, to take AKK down. The implication is, what we need here is a strong parent figure to keep these kids from fighting within the family, and Merkel is not performing this role.

I have to say, by the way, I feel weird passing on this information from a single source; it’s just that the source is a trusted one. On the other hand, I find Ulrich’s a bit harsh on AKK for lacking the rank required to deal on a level playing field with Macron, for example, or stand up to Maas on her own, because she isn’t chancellor. A flaw in the structure of the system, evidently, this fact that Merkel’s power as both chancellor and head of the leading party is now divided, leaving both leaders handicapped.

And the problems don’t end there. The German army, Ulrich tells us, doesn’t function properly and Germany is now combing Mexico for nurses to deal with its aging population. They are unable to produce enough of their own due to low wages and demanding work requirements. As in the United States (my observation, not Ulrich’s) the need to give in to the demands of right-leaning voters on climate change has left Germany with a woefully inadequate response to the crisis, and it has been breaking treaties one after another. Furthermore, they are failing as well to face the challenges of ever-increasing digitalization. And the critical loss of species around the world.

Of course you can’t blame all of Germany’s problems on Angela Merkel, Ulrich says, nonetheless managing to take a swipe at her “Biedermeier” nature (i.e., stay at home and play it safe) at the same time. Not that Merkel herself is “bieder” (boring); it’s just that after so many years in office, fatigue and irritability have set in - fatigue on the part of the government, irritability on the part of the general public. That irritability (as paralleled in the U.S. by so many who voted for Trump) is evidenced by the advent and rapid growth of the AfD.

Merkel’s power has always been in her ability to moderate what came her way. That no longer seems to be the case. Things have gotten out of hand. In the past, if I understand what Ulrich is saying, Merkel solved problems in a kind of ad hoc fashion, without a clear program for making policy. And now there are no policies in place adequate to the challenges. Everything is about style and identity. Rather than having a clear well-founded argument for bringing CO2 down to a certain level, for example, it’s about being seen to be dealing with the problem. Gestures of moral superiority are assumed to be enough, and clearly they are not. It has not been whether Germany is actually safe, Ulrich complains, only whether it feels safe. “The assertion of uncertainty becomes more important than the crime rate, reality becomes opinion, assertion becomes proof, feelings become argument, concern becomes aggression.” Society has dammed itself up. And because Germany is an open society, these incongruities are there for all to see.

Conflict is everywhere. The government tries to be objective; the public gets hysterical. Negatives get normalized at the same time we face apocalyptic ideas. Depoliticization and over-politicization sit side-by-side and even condition one another.

The problems are huge. The huge influx of refugees fleeing war and poverty seems to be overrunning the continent, and many interpret this as an existential threat. Even historically liberal and progressive folks are coming around to thinking this way. The climate crisis is real and it is serious. The Merkel government’s inclination to continue with more of the same is increasingly seen as the wrong way to go, a more woefully inadequate response with each passing day. These days, says Ulrich, Merkel’s silence on the big issues speaks loudly. You have to wonder if she has anything left to say. What is she thinking? One is reminded of Ratzinger retiring as pope because he was not up to the priest abuse crisis (my observation, not Ulrich’s). But then again (also my observation), that's speculation, and unfair to somebody known for workaholic inclinations who should be allowed, like anybody else, just to get tired.

Is this going to be how Merkel is remembered? As somebody who had to retire because she can’t do anything about the fact that things are slipping away from her? About her failure to deal with the climate crisis? Because she was so wrong about choosing AKK as her successor? She created (and one assumed AKK would further this) a kind of feminist (and anti-Trump) way of governing, based on working together rather than humiliating one’s political opponents, being efficient, curious and unpretentious. Is this approach now to be discredited?

The article goes into the nitty gritty of Merkel's governing style, which I won't repeat here, since I believe this overview tells the heart of the story. As somebody who watches politics as an outsider, and rarely gets into the details where the devil lives, I am easily drawn to sweeping meta-explanations for what's going on. I like to think, for example, that what America is going through at the moment is a serious test of the strength of its institutions, that while we are easily distracted by a corrupt self-serving president, our real problem is that one of our political parties has become corrupted so badly that it has to be allowed to self-destruct and clear the way for a new one, one with integrity, to grow in its place, one that can represent conservative views with integrity. America, if this is what's happening, is righting itself, in other words.

But by that same reasoning it may be that Germany, on the other hand, for a long time in recent years a model for America to follow, may be going in the other direction. If Ulrich has his finger on the pulse of his nation (and I'm not in a position to judge that, I'm afraid), things are falling apart. And there is no one waiting in the wings to take over and put things right.

We're living at a time of tremendous internal churning. The U.S. so good at wealth generation and so poor at equitable distribution of that wealth, has generated a critical mass of folk susceptible to populist politicians ready to pull them out of the frying pan into the fire. The UK is being jerked around by a parallel minority of English voters who have torn Britain apart by Brexit; France and Spain, Holland and Scandinavia and Italy are all struggling with finding the right stance to take in regard to a defense of Western Civilization; Hungary and Turkey have already fallen to dictators, and Poland is drifting in that direction.

There's no joy in telling this story. There is hope, however, that since Europe and America have now had enough experience with democracy that they know how to straighten up and fly right if they want to, a critical mass of enlightened voters in these countries will find a way to make it happen.