By Jochen Bittner
HAMBURG, Germany — Two things make Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany look like an exemplary head of government: Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. Measured against the poorest of benchmarks, Ms. Merkel’s chancellorship, even after 14 years in office, appears stable, wise and exemplary. Measured against the leadership Germany and Europe need, it lacks all of the above.
To describe Ms. Merkel’s current term, which began in 2017, as strategic fatigue would be a friendly understatement. The chancellor appears to not only have lost interest in decision-making. She also shows little resolve to steer the country through a new era of staggering change.
While America retreats from Europe, China is pushing to get in the door, applying a divide-and-conquer strategy against the European Union’s 28 member states and its applicants in the Balkans. These are epochal tipping points that demand big answers. Ms. Merkel doesn’t appear to have any.
Domestically, the split among voters over mass migration, which Ms. Merkel helped instigate in 2015, has yet to heal. And now a new cleavage is polarizing our society: Will demands to tackle climate change prove too much for German industry, or too little to prevent humankind from suicide?
Confronted with these challenges, the chancellor appears to have decided to retreat into a monarchic stoicism. Since she left the leadership of her center-right Christian Democratic Union last year, she has had little to do with day-to-day politics. If she does still lead, she does so behind a veil of seeming indifference.
In her place is Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, known as A.K.K., the defense minister and Ms. Merkel’s replacement as the head of the Christian Democrats. With an increasing air of desperation, Ms. Kramp-Karrenbauer has been trying to strengthen the party’s centrist profile. Yet instead of attracting new ranks, she deters them. She clearly has no talent for appealing to voters where they increasingly are, online. Instead, she has repeatedly demonstrated that timeless skill of putting her foot in her mouth, mocking intersex people and making lewd comments about a young Youtuber and freedom of speech.. Her popularity has plummeted.
German Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, and head of he Christian Democratic Union, has struggled to attract new members.Credit...Philipp Guelland/EPA, via Shutterstock
Ms. Merkel, meanwhile, avoids miscommunication — by not communicating much at all. In a recent awkward appearance, she had herself “interviewed” online by a party member. Instead of answering a slew of easy questions on current events, she rambled on about the past, like the elder stateswomen she is. Obviously, this is the role she sees for herself: an inspiration who has earned the right to rest on her laurels. Germans once called her Mutti — Mum. Now she increasingly appears like Queen Mutti.
Ms. Merkel’s virtual absence has meant that it is up to Ms. Kramp-Karrenbauer to handle the challenges pressing in on Berlin. She has done so eagerly, if not deftly. In a U-turn from Germany’s tradition of military restraint, she recently demanded the establishment of a security zone in northern Syria. While this is certainly a good idea in substance, it came both too late and without any coordination with the rest of NATO — or even the rest of the German government. The foreign minister learned about the move via text message while Ms. Kramp-Karrenbauer was rushing to the TV station to air her idea. Instead of a sober debate, her sudden pivot plunged the cabinet and Parliament into disarray.
While Ms. Kramp-Karrenbauer is a specialist in fumbled communication, Ms. Merkel is the woman to beat in another discipline: the too-little-too-late decision. The latest examples are new laws to fight climate change overseen by Ms. Merkel after months of enormous public pressure by the Fridays for Future movement. But the measures she proposed to reduce national CO₂ emissions fell short of the expectations of even many conservatives and business representatives. In a poll, 53 percent of Germans said they were disappointed.
Ms. Merkel is clearly tired of the hard conflicts necessary to set a country’s course. She prefers the path of least resistance — even if it is damaging for the nation. Take her recent decision not to ban the Chinese company Huawei as a candidate to built Germany’s 5G cellular network. The same woman who in 2011 ordered Germany to draw down its nuclear energy sector because the risks were too high now has no problem with the risk of letting a dictatorship take hold of Germany’s digital backbone.
Representative democracy requires a country’s representatives to propose timely, acceptable solutions to its most pressing problems. In today’s world of growing fear in the face of unfamiliar challenges, voters tend to prefer politicians who overstate problems and take bold actions over politicians who understate problems and keep their ambitions low. There might be a time for timidity; today it only weakens the establishment and strengthens the fringes.
Germany doesn’t need a Queen Mutti. It needs a political authority to help moderate and mitigate growing social cleavages. Ms. Merkel should be so kind as to let the country know whether she intends to become this authority any time soon. And if not, she should make way for someone who will.
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