The bill is now on the table

On September 25, art historian Horst Bredekamp will give a lecture in the Leibniz Hall of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. He does so in honor of Angela Merkel He will be seven on Wednesday. What is special about this event is the host: Friedrich Merz. The CDU chairman invited people to the event and said: “We are looking forward to it.”

The relationship between Merkel and Merz has been fractured since Merkel took over the leadership of the Union parliamentary group in the Bundestag from Merkel in 2002. But this dispute between two CDU members of almost the same age, now at least ostensibly resolved, is just the tip of the iceberg. After the Kohl era, some in the CDU wanted to take over as unity chancellor after a (as short as possible) social democratic interlude. Not just the one thwarted by Kohl. German politicianThere is also the much younger and more conservative Hesse Roland Koch, who won the state election with a signature campaign opposing the dual citizenship decided by the Red-Green Alliance.

Then came the CDU donations affair – and Angela Merkel. When the East German became party leader Wolfgang Schaeuble’s general secretary, the power-hungry West German Christian Democrats still accepted it. When Merkel used the donations scandal to unseat Kohl from his throne, some wondered if it might be more than just a blip in the party’s history. The feeling intensified after her election as chairwoman in 2000. Two years later, it was widely believed that a young woman from the East could not become a candidate for chancellor. Christian Democratic Union There is still enough power to prevent Merkel from running.

But even her skeptics could no longer stop her from running in a surprise snap election in 2005. Even by a narrower-than-expected margin, Merkel regained the CDU chancellorship and a 16-year run of power and office.

Angela Merkel did not arrive in the Federal Republic with a ready-made agenda to turn the CDU towards the centre-left. Instead, the physicist, who had lived in East German society for more than three decades, did not have a master plan. Her goal was to show herself and Germany that she was just as sound and successful as her fellow West Germans when it came to power politics in the Federal Republic. This was a huge challenge, especially in the male-dominated West German CDU.

With incredible discipline, Merkel concealed the importance of this goal from the beginning until almost the end of her term as chancellor. The secret was revealed when she gave her last speech as head of government on German Unity Day in 2021. She revealed that as an East German, she did not feel like a full-fledged West German even after 16 years in the country’s most important political post. Never before had she allowed her compatriots, especially most of the top West German politicians who sat before her, to look so deeply into her soul. Two years later, as a former chancellor, she repeated this complaint in a television interview so that no one would think it was a one-off outburst.

Merkel demonstrated her enormous flexibility in her first political post, as Minister for Women. Like a slalom athlete doing everything she can to avoid falling through the goalposts, East Germany’s more liberal abortion laws had to be combined with German federal regulations. Merkel certainly had her own opinions in the 218th paragraph controversy, and she later explained how she tried not to make any promises in order not to get hurt.

The most dramatic shift came in 2011 when the German chancellor, who had ruled Germany for six years, gave a birthday speech to Germany. The lobbying association German Atomic Forum, which had just extended the life of Germany’s nuclear power plants on its fiftieth anniversary, led the country to withdraw. It was not because it changed its position on nuclear power, but because of pressure from influential CDU and CSU politicians, and a strong anti-nuclear sentiment formed on the political left.

The situation is similar in other areas. Angela Merkel is not naive about Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, and certainly not pro-Russian for ideological reasons, as some of her Social Democratic coalition partners are. She built the Nord Stream line because the economy wanted to make money and the Germans wanted cheap gas. The Bundeswehr has been severely neglected because Germans don’t like rearmament. Even on refugee policy, she believed that with her liberal line she had the support of the majority. Only when she noticed that enthusiasm was waning, and when her CSU and CDU partymates in particular made this clear to her, did she realize that she had misjudged the atmosphere. She had been in power for too long, so the reaction was stubborn. She announced that if her “friendly face” policy on immigrants was rejected, she would no longer consider Germany “my country.”

The absolute will to survive in Germany means that they prefer to accept the actual or perceived will of the majority rather than take risks. Just don’t fail! She has done a lot of service to her fellow countrymen. The economy is stable, unemployment is low, the euro has saved it, and conflicts with Russia and China are limited. Many are satisfied with this so-called eternal peace and prosperity. Now the calculation is on the table: Germany has a lot of work to do to become more independent from Russian energy, American military protection and Chinese technology. It will take time.