World View: The Merkel method only got Europe so far

At the heart of Angela Merkel’s political style is her disdain for the very idea of style in politics. She practised politics as the negation of style. Not for her the grand vision or the soaring rhetoric. Everything from her low-key oratory, its cadences like a Wikipedia entry, to her resolutely unchanging uniform spoke of the same suspicion of ornamentation. In an age when most politicians are resigned to sacrificing their privacy and submitting themselves to the indignities of celebrity culture, she did neither.

She approached the exercise of power in much the same way. What Beckett did to language – stripping away each flourish, excising every adornment – she did to politics. When your dishwasher breaks, she once said, you don't want exhaustive theories as to what went wrong; you want it fixed. And that was how she saw her role. Voters wanted things fixed. Her job was to fix them – one by one, step by step, year after year. Germany and Europe changed on her watch – not according to a grand design but through the slow accretion of these individual fixes. Some of her views remained constant, certainly, but the rigidity of her personal style many misread as inflexibility of thought. At home and abroad, Merkel was adaptable, pragmatic and capable of chameleon-like shifts that wrong-footed opponents and helped ensure her remarkable longevity. It was politics as problem-solving puzzle.

By almost every measure, the Merkel method worked. When she steps down next month, on her own terms, after 16 years in office, she will bequeath a country that lives well, where unemployment is at 6 per cent and whose status as Europe’s political and economic powerhouse is largely unchallenged. A whole generation of Germans has no memory of the years, immediately preceding Merkel’s coming to power, when the country was portrayed as the ageing, change-averse “sick man of Europe”.

Brexit’s aftermath

The European stage, where progress is made through consensus-building and deal-making, rewards leadership qualities like Merkel’s. Whereas her French counterparts, accustomed to their domestic role as republican monarch, would declaim their ambitions for EU reform and hope everyone else fell into line, Merkel moved slowly, always leading from the centre, rarely divulging her ideas until she had to, and sometimes not even then. What emerged was almost invariably closer to her own position.

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In a succession of EU crises that called above all for a steady hand, Merkel's ability to hold things together made her not just effective but indispensable. Many bemoaned her caution during the financial crisis, but there is a plausible counter-factual history of the past decade in which, under a different German leader, the euro collapses. It's arguable that Merkel could have done more to keep the United Kingdom in the European Union, but her handling of the Brexit vote's aftermath, which consisted mainly of refusing to get involved in talks between Brussels and London, helped the EU emerge stronger from that messy divorce. Her actions at the height of the surge in migrant arrivals in 2015-2016, when her pragmatism combined with her basic decency to memorable effect, provided moral leadership when it was needed.

Democratic drift

Yet Merkelism had its limits. Reducing every problem to its constituent parts and taking each of them on sequentially may have satisfied Merkel the physicist, but it meant that on two of the biggest threats Europe faced – the climate emergency and the drift towards authoritarianism in central Europe – Merkel the politician fell short. She understood the seriousness of both. As a scientist and a former environment minister, she mastered the climate brief and took steps to expand Germany's renewable energy share. But even she admits that she didn't go nearly far enough. As a liberal whose attachment to the rule of law was perhaps the most obviously ideological position she held, she was fully aware of the dangerous democratic drift in Hungary and Poland. But her instinct was to keep demagogues such as Viktor Orban inside the tent, to believe that dialogue could act as a brake on their excesses. Too often it came across as tolerance. Certainly it seemed to have little effect.

Global warming and the threat to democracy in the EU are two crises that cannot be understood on a small canvass. They can only be met with the sort of bold, era-defining steps that Merkel recoiled from. With more ambition she could have turbo-charged Europe’s energy transition. Today, the continent is crying out for someone who can articulate the scale of these crises and to galvanise people for the radical collective effort it will require to resolve them. That was never going to be Merkel. “The idea that a person can touch other people so much with words that they change their minds is not one I have ever shared – but it’s a beautiful idea nonetheless,” she said in 2016.

Here's the paradox. Europe will be diminished without Angela Merkel in charge. And yet her departure may be necessary for it to adapt to a new era.