ANALYSIS:THE CHRISTMAS gift of choice among cheeky Berlin politicians this year is The Angie Dressbook. It's a new take on an old idea, a dress-up paper doll allowing you to clothe Angela Merkel in a variety of outfits: a lace-up Bavarian dirndl, a shimmering black ball-gown, even army fatigues, writes DEREK SCALLY
“No more talk about our chancellor lacking style!” exclaims the book that one Berlin insider has nicknamed “Pimp My Merkel”.
Two reasons spring to mind over why this gift is so popular: first, it’s a long-awaited chance to see Merkel in something that isn’t one of the identical trouser suits she wears with a kaleidoscope of coloured jackets.
More importantly, however, The Angie Dressbookis a reminder that, two months into her second term, people are wishing the real Angela Merkel would stand up. The impatience is palpable, even within her own cabinet.
“We need a goal,” complained one nameless cabinet minister to the Süddeutsche Zeitung this week. “We have no common compass. We cannot explain what we want from this government.”
The September 25th election result returned Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) to power, this time with the pro-business, liberal Free Democrats (FDP) who kept Helmut Kohl in power for 17 years.
What was supposed to be a dream team is, after several false starts, still in the starting blocks. Its to-do list from September has turned into a list of problems.
Merkel’s most taxing domestic problem is tax.
Yesterday afternoon, she hauled in the governors of CDU-ruled federal states to ask why they have been bad-mouthing a law that promises an extra €8.5 billion in funding for childcare and tax breaks for companies, heirs and hoteliers.
They pointed out that the new law splits the tax shortfall between the federal and state level, robbing their cash-starved state budgets of about €130 million in badly needed income.
The Bundesrat, the chamber representing the federal states, votes on the law on Friday and Merkel cannot afford failure on the first big project of her administration.
So, despite her promises to the contrary, expect the chancellor to buy off enough obstinate state premiers at the last minute to secure the vote.
In normal circumstances, political observers would welcome this horse-trading as a return to business as usual in the German capital.
But it’s important to remember that this is new territory for Merkel: she cut her teeth as chancellor heading a grand coalition.
This was a comfortable carriage for four years, matching Merkel’s preferred approach to power of ruling through moderating.
Rather than push through a programme, she preferred to let things drift and, only when pressed, push through over watery compromises with her political opponents, the Social Democrats.
The CDU and SPD’s combined parliamentary strength guaranteed a huge majority and kept Merkel’s enemies checking each other.
First, having the SPD at close quarters reined in the party that, in normal parliamentary circumstances, would watch and critique her work in office.
Second, sharing power with the SPD put manners on her rivals within the CDU. These 50-something men, the so-called “crown princes”, still smart over how Merkel outfoxed them to the party leadership a decade ago.
In the last four years, these impatient princes recognised that the grand coalition was not the time to challenge their own party leader. But now their time has come: the tax row has given them the first chance to boost their political profile at Merkel’s expense. Taxing fiscal matters will raise their head again in the coming year: her FDP coalition partners only came abroad with a promise of a major overhaul of Germany’s Kafkaesque tax code, followed by radical tax cuts.
But finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble – Merkel’s bad lieutenant at the cabinet table – has no plans to honour that promise.
With an extra €100 billion in new borrowing pencilled in for next year – over 5 per cent of GDP – he sees no room for tax breaks, so expect tears and tantrums from the FDP.
Between the two domestic tax headaches, however, Merkel faces perhaps the greatest challenge yet in her political career, one for which four years of grand coalition has left her ill-equipped: the fallout from the September 4th, German-ordered air strike in Afghanistan that killed in excess of 140 people.
For three months, Berlin insisted the strike was a justifiable measure to prevent two Taliban-hijacked petrol tankers being turned into “rolling bombs”.
But by now daily revelations have cast a very different light on the mission, and raised serious questions about Germany’s true involvement in Afghanistan.
Leaks from official reports about the bombing, which reportedly breached Nato’s own guidelines, suggest the German colonel in charge was acting in concert with a team of elite German soldiers and that Taliban insurgents – not the tankers – were the real targets of the bombing.
Targeted killing of Taliban figures is a long way from why Germany went to Afghanistan. Mindful of pacifist views back home, German soldiers are supposed to be building schools and training policeman.
But Merkel’s insistence that Germany is fulfilling a reconstruction role, and her energetic denial that it is involved in a war in Afghanistan, sounds hollow after Red Cross reports of up to 70 civilian dead, including children as young as eight years old.
For four years, Merkel has avoided heading a national discussion about Germany’s military role in the world.
Now she has lost the initiative to the parliamentary foreign affairs committee that will begin hearings later this week on the bombing and on the reality of a mission to Afghanistan that two-thirds of Germans want ended.
Once, political strategists praised Angela Merkel as the pragmatic East German pastor’s daughter who always secured the strategic advantage by speaking and acting only at the last minute.
After four grand coalition years, fine-tuning the art of pragmatic procrastination, the time has come for the dress-up Angela Merkel to get working or else face a severe dressing down.