“I wasn’t born chancellor,” said German leader Angela Merkel in an ad for her 2009 reelection campaign. She repeated the phrase in late October at a press conference to announce her coming resignation as chairman of her party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Recent state elections have brought voter uprisings against the CDU in Hesse (home to Frankfurt and the German banking industry) and against its Christian Social Union (CSU) allies in Bavaria (an industrial powerhouse centered on Munich). Merkel meant to express humility, as she had in the ad a decade ago: She is a woman who remembers that politicians work for the people. But now her words had the opposite effect—it really did feel like she had been born chancellor. Merkel has led the CDU since 2000, when Bill Clinton was in office. Merkel also announced that this term, her fourth, would be her last. It still has about four years to run.
Much of the international press coverage, though, has the tone of an obituary, and for good reason. It is as difficult to beat an orderly retreat in politics as it is in warfare. In 2006 British prime minister Tony Blair tried to give up the chairmanship of the Labour party while clinging to his office. He discovered that the former was an indispensable power base for the latter and was forced into an earlier-than-intended retirement. A party chairmanship is traditionally even more important in Germany, and Merkel admitted at her press conference that separating the two functions was a “risk.”
Strangely Merkel is described as a “centrist” in almost all of this valedictory coverage. The account in the Financial Times begins: “Angela Merkel dragged her Christian Democratic Union kicking and screaming to the centre-ground of German politics.” Such accounts are wrong. Merkel was impetuous and radical. After a Pacific tsunami caused a meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima plant in 2011, she announced an end to Germany’s nuclear energy program. She abolished compulsory military service. She arranged the vote that passed gay marriage. At the height of the Syrian war in 2015, she announced that Germany would welcome refugees, setting off a march towards Europe from all corners of the Muslim world. That has changed her country and embittered her electorate. Every political force that tried to form a coalition with Merkel suffered for it, from the Free Democratic party after 2009 to the Social Democrats now.
But even when Merkel’s policymaking made her less popular at home and abroad, it made her a heroine to the politicians, bureaucrats, and journalists eager to melt the nations of Europe into an ever-closer European Union. Since Germany is Europe’s biggest and most stable economy, Merkel had the authority to dictate Europe’s economic rules in a time of crisis. She opted, against the counsel of her advisers, to force bankrupt Greece to stay in the continent’s common currency, the euro—almost surely to Greece’s detriment. She negotiated a multibillion-dollar payment to Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan to dam the flow of refugees that Syria and her own rhetoric had set in motion. Merkel is centrist only in the sense that anything wished by the builders of the E.U. becomes “centrist” by definition.
In retrospect, Merkel’s move seems cynical and destabilizing. She exploited a weakness that had developed in the West German political system in the years before the two Germanies were reunified in 1990. Rather like a convalescing patient who grows addicted to his painkiller prescription, West Germany after World War II formed certain habits under American occupation and influence that made political life more manageable. One was the unwritten rule that there would be no parties more conservative than Union (the Christian Democratic Union and the Bavarian CSU). This made Germany among the least radical political cultures in the West. The conservative Franz Josef Strauss, who dominated Bavaria from the 1960s through the 1980s and nearly became chancellor himself, turned this rule into a semi-constitutional formula: “To the right of the Union there can be no democratically legitimate force.” As Strauss understood things, it was incumbent on the Union to be true to democratic conservatism, because this assembly of businessmen and churchgoers was the only conservative party Germany was going to get.
Merkel took Strauss’s motto in the opposite sense. Raised in Communist East Germany, she had no deep allegiance to the CDU’s (and West Germany’s) constitutional culture. She sought votes among Social Democrats and Greens by duplicating their policies. Gay marriage, no nukes, ending the draft, open borders . . . these were not the positions of her own party but of its traditional opponents. The taboo on parties to the right of the CDU would protect her conservative flank from electoral competition. It was elegantly Machiavellian and tactically sophisticated, rather like rushing the fullbacks up in soccer to pull an attacker offside.
But Merkel would reap great benefit from stealing her opposition’s clothes only until other political actors—and the German political culture—adjusted. That adjustment has happened over the past half-decade. The Alternative for Germany party (AfD) arose to protest Merkel’s plans for the euro rescue. It later became a vehicle for protesting her opening Germany’s borders to Middle Eastern migrants. With the Hesse and Bavaria elections, the AfD took seats in the last two state parliaments in which it had been unrepresented. Other things are going on, too. The Left party has risen from the ashes of East German communism to gain a following in the western part of the country. The Greens are on the verge of ousting Social Democrats as the number-two party. Populist politicians, promising to protect their citizens from sharing the burden of Merkel’s invitation to migrants, have been elected across Eastern Europe.
Her legacy is a varied and important one. You wouldn’t call it a centrist one.
