Leader who left a Merk’ on Europe...
ANGELA WAS SYMBOL OF AUSTERITY BAILOUT
DURING her time as Germany’s first female chancellor, Angela Merkel played a vital role in securing Ireland’s bailout.
Ms Merkel (67) is stepping down after 16 years as the country’s leader — and has been at the helm of the world’s biggest economy and a key figure in steering European policy.
German federal elections will be held tomorrow to decide her successor.
During her time as chancellor, she has seen five taoisigh, four French presidents, five British prime ministers and eight Italian premiers come and go.
She also became an unpopular figurehead in Ireland after the financial crash in Ireland and the European Union and International Monetary Fund bailout.
Many countries on the receiving end of such bailouts, including Ireland, lost trust in the EU as Germany was seen as pushing through austerity and hardship instead of help.
She represented austerity for the member states whose economies suffered greatest while Germany was relatively unscathed due to its strong export economy which benefited from a weakened euro.
Former Taoiseach Enda Kenny said while Ms Merkel was motivated by protecting German banks, she had held other EU leaders back who wanted the bailout conditional on Ireland raising its corporate tax rate.
Protect
“Of course, she was going to have to protect her own position insofar as German and French, [insofar as] German banks were concerned in particular,” he said.
“Some of the [ EU] partners around that table would have been very quick to make propositions that were simply not acceptable to Ireland in any circumstances.
“Angela Merkel, as chancellor, had a restraining role from what some of the others might want implemented — and quickly.
“She among all the other [ EU] leaders understood fully what was really important from an Irish perspective and stood by that.”
After the €64billion bailout was granted, Ms Merkel made it clear that she would not agree to a deal that would reduce the crippling bill.
She insisted she was opposed to any agreement that would lower the cost of the bailout, including a reduction of interest repayments, saying it would worry international investors and send the wrong message to other bailout countries.
Ireland went on to become the first eurozone member state to complete its exit from the EU and IMF’s bailout in 2013.
Ms Me rke l hailed Ireland’s exit as a “tremendous success story”.
Around this time, Irish football fans attracted media attention with a sign they brought to the Euro 2012 championship.
Gerry Nolan and his friends from Limerick made the cheeky sign that read “Angela Merkel thinks we’re at work.”
The friends, who all graduated from college in Limerick, went viral when they posted the snap of themselves with the flag at Dublin Airport before jetting off to Prague.
Gerry said: “It was purely a joke, it wasn’t political at all. We just wanted to lighten the mood a bit — Germany gets quite a hard time.”
Referendum
After the Brexit referendum in 2016, Ms Merkel acted as an ally to Ireland in negotiations.
Mr Kenny suggested Ms Merkel, who grew up in east Germany, knew it was important not to have a hard border on the island.
Ms Merkel, who was a physicist before she entered politics, is the longest serving chancellor since Otto Bismarck from 1871 to 1890.
She was born Angela Kasner in Hamburg in north- western Germany in 1954 and grew up in East Germany. She was good at Mathematics and Russian in school and went on to study Physics.
She married physicist Ulrich Merkel at the age of 23 but the marriage didn’t last and they divorced four years later, in 1981. She kept her married surname.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, she joined the fledgling opposition party Demokratische Aufbruch (Democratic Awakening).
In the first all- Germany elections in 1990, Merkel won a seat for the Christian Democratic Union and rose quickly through the ranks of the centre-right party, becoming Federal Minister for Women and Children in 1991.
Three years later, she was appointed Minister for the Environment, was chosen to lead the CDU in 2000 and became chancellor in 2005.
She was named Person of the Year by Time magazine for her decision to keep Germany’s borders open to migrants but her decisions did not prove popular with voters.
Now, Germany’s political parties are working to win over undecided voters before today’s national election that will determine who succeeds Ms Merkel as chancellor.