Angela Merkel: now leader of the non-populist free world

Angela Merkel went to bed on Tuesday night as Europe’s first-among-equals leader. She woke up on Wednesday as the leader of the non-populist free world.

After crisis meetings with her kitchen cabinet, she went before television cameras at noon to deliver terse congratulations to US president-elect Donald Trump, then rounded off a surreal day being celebrated as the “angel” of Munich’s Jewish community.

In the German – and Jewish - calendar, November 9th is a fated date. In 1938, November 9th was the shameful night when mobs burned and ransacked Jewish places of prayer and business.

November 9th in 1989 saw a joyful, peaceful, mob breach the Berlin Wall. As if that isn’t enough history for one date, November 9th marked the end of the German kaiser in 1918 and, 5 years later, Adolf Hitler’s beerhall putsch in Munich.

In that city last Wednesday, the local Jewish community awarded their highest honour to a woman they view as a friend and guardian in an age of anxiety.

Holocaust survivor

Rabbi Arthur Schieler, a Holocaust survivor, told Chancellor Angela Merkel: “You have always stayed true to your moral compass. You are a blessing.”

Back in her Berlin reality, however, Merkel’s political and moral compass is facing its greatest challenge yet. With other western leaders preoccupied or lame ducks, Merkel is watching Washington, and waiting.

Like many political colleagues, she has never met Donald Trump and, like them, has no idea yet whether the mogul will become a more moderate conservative president or a modified version of a candidate who took office on public embrace of authoritarian, post-factual nationalism.

While she waits, Merkel can reflect on how her entire 11-year career as chancellor to date has been coloured by awkward men.

Grappling with Nicolas Sarkozy of France was Merkel’s masterclass in hyperactive male narcissism. Misogynist macho leaders with bizarre hair? Bunga Bunga Berlusconi wrote the book on that. With economic ease, Dr Merkel dispensed with him at a 2011 press conference simply by raising her eyes to heaven.

Despite Trump’s campaign broadsides against her politics and person, when Merkel finally meets him, she will give him a blast of the considerable charm she deploys in private but rarely in public. The wily leader will let him talk – powerful men love to talk, she has learned – to get a better measure of him than he will of her. Eventually she will employ tactics that have held in check even Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

Every aspect of Merkel’s political rhetoric and body language is governed by could be called the “Aesthetik des Entzuges” – the aesthetic of deprivation. Put simply, Merkel’s successful political career is based on her refusal to even acknowledge nonsense. Eventually, so her logic goes, even the greatest political macho, narcissist or misogynist runs out of steam.

But in this era of post-factual politics, will this Merkel method be enough to trump Trump’s populism?

Populist chain reaction

The German leader’s carefully-calibrated congratulatory statement was a signal of things to come. She offered Mr Trump a close co-operation, but only on the shared values of respect cherished by the US and Germany.

Looking on in Germany, a feeling of encirclement angst has settled over the country. Next month, uninhibited by US voters, Austrians to the south may choose post-war Europe’s first populist president. That could trigger a populist chain reaction next year’s elections in France, the Netherlands and even in Germany. To the east and south, Orban’s Hungary is already there, while Kaczynski’s Poland is heading that way.

Even before she meets Trump, he may have actually boosted her chances of securing a fourth term if, next September, German voters seek stability in uncertain times.

But after being buffeted by the banking, finance and refugee crisis, some German analysts fear Trump’s triumph marks the next stage of a “Weimarisation” process in the west, a nod to the credibility collapse of 1930s Germany’s centrist establishment.

In Germany this week, Trump’s triumph has prompted much reflection on its own disastrous embrace of populism. More than other countries Germany knows what can happen when the establishment’s laughter at a political populist dies in their throats. When the populist takes power, it is too late to stop the slide to disaster.

And so, with Trump’s victory just 11 hours old, Merkel’s warning carried an added, urgent edge. “With concern we can see how easily anti-Semitic, racist and misanthropic ideas reverberate today – right into the heart of our society,” she told Munich’s Jewish community.

“We owe it to the victims of the Shoa, and ourselves . . . to face down decisively today’s threats through hate and anti-Semitism.”

In a week when populist hate went global, Germany and its chancellor may have found a new calling.