By Constanze Stelzenmüller
Years ago, at the Munich Security Conference, I found myself squeezed in on the steps of the grand staircase of a hotel ballroom, trying, dutifully but vainly, to follow a more than usually humdrum speech by Germany’s first female chancellor. Tuning out, I recognized the one-star general hunkered down beside me, a senior staffer in the chancellery. I tapped his sleeve and said, “So what’s it like to work for her?” He turned to me and grinned appreciatively. “It’s like working next to a nuclear power plant. It just runs, and runs, and runs.”
And how it ran. Angela Merkel is now in the final months of her fourth term in office, her last, which is set to end with national elections on September 26. Only Helmut Kohl, the chancellor who oversaw the joining of East and West Germany in 1990, held office for longer. A Pew poll last year showed Merkel to be the world’s most trusted leader. Forbes magazine has ranked her the world’s most powerful woman for ten years in a row. In 2009, the toy company Mattel even created an Angela Merkel Barbie doll. For a while, some U.S. and British commentators, dismayed by their own leaders, even took to calling her “the leader of the free world” (a title the chancellor is said to detest).
Yet at the same time, Merkel’s opacity and technocratic prudence have frustrated and often infuriated those who wanted Germany to articulate a clearer vision of its role in a liberal world order, to take on greater responsibility for defending and shaping that order—or just to acknowledge and mitigate the impact of the country’s decisions on its neighbors and allies. And although the 66-year-old conservative remains her country’s best-liked politician, public approval of her government has dipped sharply as frustration with its haphazard pandemic management has grown.
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