Merkel on way out, era ends in EU
Whatever anyone’s views on the enterprise, there was one question always begging to be asked of the European Union: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” At an early stage it wasn’t clear to everyone. Then the purpose and direction of travel seemed agreed — under the stewardship of Angela Merkel. She was there to settle disputes, authorise bailouts, offer German help to struggling nations and protect the project as it led to ever- closer union. Whatever else can be said of it, with Merkel at the helm, at least the EU appeared to have direction. Not anymore.
This week — after another political drubbing for the CDU in Hesse — the German Chancellor announced that she would not seek re- election as head of the party she has led for 18 years. She also announced she would be stepping down as Chancellor at the next election, in 2021, a position she has held since 2005. Her demise is proving a drawn- out affair — but we can see, in parallel, the demise of her vision of Europe. A clear, federalist vision which once seemed inevitable and now sorely lacks a leader. Today there is simply no one on the scene capable of acting as the queen or emperor of that project, as Merkel has done for the past decade. The Merkel project had created a EU that had unachievable ambitions, seeking to govern countries with long histories of independence, and was fundamentally un- European in that it sought to impose uniformity.
The first scent trails of her political mortality came in 2016, when in regional elections in Pomerania the threeyearold Alternative für Deutschland ( AfD) beat her own party into a humiliating third place. Then came last year’s German elections, in which the CDU suffered its worst results since 1949. Merkel spent six humiliating months trying to persuade other parties to go back into coalition with her — fighting off repeated challenges from critics.
It is easy to see why they have tried to move against her. Merkel’s great selling point — her rock- like immovability — had become an obstacle, being seen as intransigence in a Europe that badly needed to change. Indeed, that immovability turned out to be disastrous before both challenges that Europe had to respond to during Merkel’s reign — the financial crisis, and the wave of demographic change.
The Europe that Merkel led pushed the creation of a currency before it had created a country. When the global financial crisis hit the unsound structure that was the euro, Merkel had two options. She might have explained to her electorate that Germany had benefited from the euro. That its exports had soared because of it. She might have explained that now was the time for the eurozone to turn into a full transfer union, moving money from the richer unions to the poorer ones. Or she might have accepted that the eurozone covered economies that were simply too different — that German and Greek accounting practices would, to put it politely, never fully meld — and that an orderly separation of the union might be in order.
The immovable “Mutti” ( as the Germans used to fondly call her) took neither course. Instead she oversaw a system that imposed sado- austerity on southern Europe, left the eurozone ill- prepared for the next crisis, and set the stage for events that would lead to her own downfall.
But the mistake which was to prove the turning point for her chancellorship, and the European project, was the migration crisis. At its peak, in 2015, Merkel showed not only her immovability, but a unilateralism which was staggering. Throughout that period, Merkel seemed to think that she had the right to continue making decisions on behalf of an entire continent. When she unilaterally announced the suspension of normal border and asylum procedures in August that year, inviting refugees to Germany and declaring “We can do this”, she consulted few of her counterparts and listened to the warnings of none. Only as Germany became overwhelmed did the Chancellor’s presumption become clear — as did the consequences. Just as Europe had in her view shared the burden during the financial crisis, so should fellow member states split the bill that Merkel had run up alone in Berlin, in her one heady moment of moral intoxication. But the rest of Europe turned away. From Westminster to Warsaw, nobody wanted to share the burden for decisions that they knew their own electorates would not forgive.
Overnight, Merkel turned from a force of stability into a wild gambler with her country’s future. And in election after election, the rest of Europe began to pull away from her. This narrative was harder to sustain once Britain voted to leave the EU. It became impossible once Italy, a founding member state, started heading in another direction.
We see this crisis playing out still, with the EU recently rejecting Italy’s proposed budget and sending the Italians back to do their maths again — with threats of billions of euros in fines if they don’t cooperate. Wherever you look — and whatever one feels — the conclusion is the same: this is not a Europe of ever- closer union. Instead, the EU has become a source of instability in the continent by its Merkel- like refusal, or inability, to reform.
Her throne will likely sit empty, because there is only one politician in Europe who seems to have any desire whatsoever to take it. Emmanuel Macron is facing the usual problem in France of a public that perennially votes for revolution and then resists all change. But the French President has been preparing for this moment of continental leadership for years — composing whole treatises on EU reform. His idea is to further centralise the eurozone, with an EU finance minister and a joint eurozone budget. For this, he needed German buy- in: as he warned Germany earlier this year, “our ambitions cannot be realised alone”. And now that Merkel has announced her own exit, Macron has lost the only real ally he had. None of the other countries, even if they wanted to, are in a position to bring along their increasingly reluctant fellow members.
Apart from Macron and the Commission, no one in Europe has taken the lesson from the Merkel era that “more” EU and fewer nation states are the way to go. Rather, the pendulum has swung the other way. And unless the Commission develops a sci- fi- like ability to become self- aware and take over the world, it looks like the role of leader of Europe will remain vacant.
There will be a future for the EU — just not the one that seemed inevitable at the height of Merkel’s power. For whatever the view from Brussels and Berlin, during the Merkel years, the rest of the continent suffered the growing pains and decided one country at a time that this wasn’t what they wanted to be. The end of an era, certainly. But not the end of the world.
Overnight, Merkel turned from a force of stability into a wild gambler with her country’s future. And in election after election, the rest of Europe began to pull away from her.
By arrangement with the Spectator