Angela Merkel – A Weak European Leader With National Feet of Clay

Angela Merkel arrives in London this week to promote her 700 pages of memoirs grandly called “Freiheit” – Freedom. (Macmillan £35) London has had a Merkel cult never awarded to any previous German Chancellor ever since she took over as Chancellor from Gerhard Schröder in 2005. The Social Democrat Schröder ruled for seven years taking over from Helmut Kohl who was Chancellor from 1982-1998. Kohl called his protogée Merkel he called “Das Mädchen” (little girl).

Add in the founding Chancellor of the post-war Federal Republic of Germany, Konrad Adenauer who ruled for 14 years and the enduring stability of centre-right Christian Democratic government in Germany in the modern era after 1945 is remarkable.

Adenauer created the social market Germany incorporating the liberal Free Democrats as a junior partner in government. Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt had 13 years of social democratic rule 1969-1982 thanks to the ever-available Free Democratic Party (FDP) liberals. Thanks to Germany’s proportional representation system, the FDP hopped from right-wing to left-wing beds not really caring or maybe even noticing who their bedfellows were as long these right-wing “Liberals” could enjoy the warmth of status and a simulacrum of influence if not power.

Helmut Kohl was the pivot chancellor between the disciplined rigour of Adenauer who was never effectively challenged by his social democratic opponents in the 1950s. Led by Kurt Schumacher who lost a leg in the first 20th century war of German nationalist imperialism, the SPD in the 1950s was strongly anti-communist, and hostile to the early era of European integration. The SPD supported the prohibition of left-wingers holding state employment jobs in the public services like teaching or regional and local government.

Unlike France, Britain or Italy where communists were the dominant political organising forces in trade unions, the German unions organised themselves into 14 industrial unions who accepted a permanent status as junior partners to capital and business in the famed Social Partnership market economy where strikes just never happened.

Helmut Kohl even found a Christian Democrat unionised metalworker, Norbert Blüm, to be his Labour and Social Affairs minister in the 1980s. At a time when unions in Britain were locked in mortal combat with their nemesis Margaret Thatcher, German trade unions remained firmly in bed with ruling Christian Democrats.

Kohl also embraced the end of anti-Sovietism and hostility to Moscow engineered by first Willy Brandt and then Helmut Schmidt. The social democratic policy on Russia of “Change through getting closer” nicknamed “Ostpolitik” altered Europe. It was adopted by Kohl and culminated in 1990 with the opening of the Berlin Wall, well described by Merkel as she was able to move west. It allowed Gorbachev to sell his own reform programme of Perestroika to the Russian elites. Both Russia and Germany would look condescendingly upon the peaceful anti-communist revolution of Polish Solidarity.

The Polish workers and their intellectual advisers connected to Paris, London and the US helped by Europe’s charismatic Polish Pope avoided provocation with their “self-limiting revolution” . For the young Angel Merkel doing her chemistry doctorate close to East Berlin in the 1980s it was clear that a peaceful transition out of communist rule was possible. The other lesson was that the rigidities of both Christian democratic rightwing and social democratic leftwing anti-communism and anti-Sovietism did not work. At school she had learnt good Russian just as clever rising careerists in India or Pakistan learnt good English to join the imperial elite.

This was the beginning of Merkel the “Putinversteher” – someone who understands Putin and thus is better equipped to deal with the young KGB Rezident in Dresden as the Berlin Wall fell. As communism tumbled into the dustbin of history, German capital, firms, investors, bankers moved en masse into the ex-communist nations of Central, East, and Balkans Europe.

In Paris, François Mitterrand, 75 when the Berlin Wall fell but still president of France until 1995, grabbed the reins of history by merging the French franc with the German mark. The creation of the Euro currency was as important as the Schuman Plan of 1950 placing the steel and coal industries of Germany, France, Italy and Benelux nations under a common European governance the forerunner of the Common Market Treaty of 1957.

Merkel in the 1990s had opted for a political career and Helmut Kohl needed competent but not challenging representatives to build a Christian democratic party presence in East Germany. Frau Doktor Angela Merkel, ever-ready with compromise language to defuse if not solve any political problem fitted the bill perfectly.

Meanwhile Vladimir Putin had returned from Dresden to St Petersburg to begin navigating the corridors of power in the post-Soviet Russia. Clever men spotted the fortunes to be made from Russia’s giant global status oil, coal, gas, steel, aluminium, and grain industries.

They invited in as partners German and to lesser extent other European, or North American and some Asian firms. By the time Merkel became Chancellor in 2005, Germany was completely dependent on Russia as a source of energy especially gas.

I was in Frankfurt in the summer of 1986 when Chernobyl took place. There was a sense of panic and fear among my hosts and friends that a nuclear cloud would descend upon Germany from Ukraine. It gave a huge boost to the anti-science Green Party which overtook the FDP liberals as a partner in government under Germany’s proportional representation system.

Gerhard Schröder, the Social Democratic Chancellor 1998-2005, undertook the major reforms that paved the way for Merkel. He cooperated with Jacques Chirac in confirming most French proposals for the new currency, its central bank under a French president but located in Frankfurt. When Tony Blair arrived as Prime Minister in 1997 he was unable to move the opposition of his finance minister, Gordon Brown, to folding the pound into the Euro.

Merkel devotes more words to Blair than all of the other four British prime ministers she dealt with. She says she shared his thinking on the EU and praised his work to stop George W Bush attacking the Kyoto climate change protocol at a G7 summit. There is barely disguised contempt for David Cameron who she describes as having “put himself in the hands of Eurosceptics as early as 2005”.

That was when the new leader of the Tory party said he would lead the Conservatives out of the European People’s Party – the federation of EU centre-right parties headed by Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union. From 2005 onwards it was impossible for Merkel to take Cameron seriously as he had already hoisted a white flag to the anti-Europeans which culminated 11 years later in the Brexit vote.

As in 1950 and 1957, Blair’s failure to join with France and Germany in the single currency meant the UK opting out of being an architect or builder of Europe which remained a continental project. The door to Brexit was opened. Blair’s endorsement of George W Bush’s decision to invade and turn Iraq into a failed state on the unproven basis that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and was involved in the Islamist attack on New York in 2001 was rejected by Chirac and Schröder.

Merkel inherited from Schröder the fusion of the German and French currencies and the commitment to a European Constitution. Schröder had also backed a major reform of the German labour market which made hiring and firing and lower-pay jobs easier for employers. It was part of the so-called Davos consensus put in place by centre-left leaders like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair based in part of Nordic and Dutch norms of labour market flexibility based on employer needs and new market challenges as manufacturing had massively relocated to cheaper labour areas in Asia, Turkey and eastern Europe.

The fate of the industrial working class was a particular problem in Germany. After reunification Kohl and then Schröder had tried to encourage German firms to open up in East Germany. Trade unions had sent experienced union officials to take over the old communist unions. It didn’t work. East German metal and other industrial firms just shut down. Some workers and many young professional with qualifications moved – like Angela Merkel - to West Germany. Those who could not move or felt that investment and jobs should be shared out from the west stayed and became knows disparagingly as “Ossis” – Easties. They formed a massive block of 16 million left-behind citizens who had only known life under dictatorship – Nazi up to 1945 and Communist thereafter.

They fondly believed that Angela Merkel as an “Ossi” would have some regard for them. But she was not willing to buck the market as it were and if the Davos elite by now running German capitalism was not interested in East Germany nor was she. They voted for the renamed East German communist party called Die Linke – the left headed by a demagogue Oskar Lafontaine.

Today they vote for the nationalist right of the AfD and the pro-Putin nationalist anti-immigrant Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht – the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance. Wagenknecht is a wealthy left demagogue perhaps comparable to Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France. She married Oscar Lafontaine 26 years her senior and broke away from Die Linke to form her populist group. It has won up to 13 per cent of votes in Land elections in eastern Germany.

To be sure all of Europe in the 21st century has faced the new politics of identity nationalist xenophobic politics. None of their parties has won power but several have entered governments or in the case of Britain produced the rupture with Europe which Merkel laments in her biography. In all cases the voter base for the populist far-right anti-European politicians are the left-behinds, the displaced indigenous working class whom the Davos Elite controllers of the European economy ignored as they shaped policies for the university educated middle classes and owners of start-up small firms who used cheaper, non-unionised, disposable, often immigrant labour.

Angela Merkel has recently claimed that the fault for Brexit lies with David Cameron. Certainly Cameron bears ultimate responsiblity. He formally broke with political Europe in 2009 when he took the Conservative Party out of the European People‘s Party federation of centre-right parties whose dominant leader was Angela Merkel. He then held a referendum on EU membership in 2016 despite the fact that every referendum on any aspect of the EU in the 21^st century had been defeated save in Spain.

Merkel says the Brexit decision was a “humiliation” that left the EU seriously weakened. But she cannot see that her leadership decisions in the EU played into the hands of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson so she too bears some responsibility for Brexit

Merkel’s decision to let more than 1 million Syrian Muslims enter Germany in 2015 and her insistence other EU states should take a share of these immigrants made immigration the top Brexit issue in Britain the following year.

It was exemplified by UKIP’s “Breaking Point” poster and leaflet of an endless snake of Muslim migrants walking through the Alps to the EU that arrived in every home in Britain. Penny Mordaunt’s untruthful statement that Turkey was poised to be an EU member so 82 million Turks could work or settle in Britain followed in the trail of Merkel’s making mass immigration the biggest European and British political issue in the run-up to the Brexit vote.

Another example was Merkel’s cruel and inhumane treatment of Greeks in order to preserve the investments of German banks. The corruption of Greek politicians by German firms after Greece joined the Euro was widely reported and turned Britain against a Brussels that would inflict such pain on a nation Britain is close to. Greek pensioners could not take more than 60 Euros a day from their bank accounts as result of the punishment Merkel, via the European Commission, inflicted on the nation.

When Greek immigrant workers and students anywhere in Europe found out Merkel was appearing at an event they held up posters of her with a Hitler moustache below her nose. Siemens was accused of paying 80 million Euros in bribes to win contracts in Greece but once Siemens bosses were back in Germany Merkel protected them.

She also says Britain is to blame for "not introducing restrictions on eastern European workers once 10 new countries joined the bloc in May 2004.” This is hypocrisy of a high order. Merkel became Chancellor in 2005. She inherited the “Zuwanderunggesetz” (Immigration law) adopted in 2004 by the Social Democratic-Green government in Germany. This permitted German firms to hire any skilled workers they needed from the new EU member states. So while technically applying the 7 -year transition period for full freedom of movement for new EU citizens Merkel ensured Germany could help itself to the best and brightest of skilled workers if it suited German business.

Today Germany has 17 million immigrants more than the population of the five East German Länder where the far-far right AfD and pro-Putin anti-immigrant nationalist BSW are scoring in the polls. Lecturing Britain on immigration numbers while turning Germany into Europe’s biggest open door immigration nation is double-speak.

British commentators have prostrated themselves in front of Merkel writing hagiographic profiles and books on how wonderful a Chancellor she was. Yet she shut down non-CO2 emitting nuclear power and replaced it with Russian fossil fuel gas and so left a dreadful legacy to Europe in terms of energy policy.

She refused to take any action against Putin as Russia was a key sales market for German firms, especially luxury gaz-guzzling and CO emitting automobiles. She blocked mergers of German defence firms with other European including British companies thus preventing the emergence of an effective European wide defence sector producing arms on a partnership basis like Airbus.

She took over Germany at the same time in 2005 as Putin was crushing the Orange revolution – the pro-democracy uprising of Ukrainians against the Russian style oligarchs and corrupt politicians that controlled Ukraine for much of this century. She allowed Putin a free hand as he continually interfered in Ukrainian national politics culminating in her turning a blind eye to his annexation of Crimea in 2014. Putin also meddled in West Balkans politics backing the anti European Serb regime headed by Alexander Vucic, who had been press officer to Slobodan Milosevic. Merkel also turned a blind eye to all the signals Putin wanted to re-establish Russia as the controlling nation of non-EU member states in South East Europe.

Merkel refused to join Poland and the Baltic states in rearming themselves as they saw clearly that Putin was the most important threat to European peace and democracy since the 1930s. She spoke Russian. The Kremlin autocrat spoke German. Yet Merkel was incapable of the first duty of national leadership which was to alert her people and a wider Europe that a disarmed Europe dependent on Russian energy would fall prey to Putin’s ambitions.

She let Nicholas Sarkozy and David Cameron make fools of themselves as they turned Libya and Syria into failed states without rule of law, police, a functioning economy, education or health services thus becoming people smuggler sieves through which migrants poured into Europe.

Angela Merkel exhibited none of vanities of European leaders whose heads were turned by the titles of prime minister or president. She stands in stark contrast to Britain’s three woman prime ministers who emerged from the bowels of the Conservative Party. The first was bad. The second sad. The third mad. By contrast Merkel’s modesty was on the surface wholly admirable as were homespun hobbies of baking plum cakes and her annual pilgrimage to a Wagner opera at Beyreuth.

But the 21^st century European Union is today a complex, contradictory partnership with some federal aspects but still thanks to Merkel remaining a grouping of nations unable to blend into something greater needed bigger, better leadership. Today British reviewers of her memoirs are being blunt about her failings. But for years British writers and journalists on Germany let down their readers in Britain by failing to report that Angela Merkel was not the super-woman described in hagiographic British journalism and books. She made mistake after mistake and compared to her predcessors as German chancellors did not serve Europe well.

Denis MacShane is the former UK Minister of Europe who has worked in Germany. He now writes on European politics.