Why the roots of the EU’s vaccine catastrophe lie in Merkel’s shadowy past in Communist East Germany
matter Merkel preferred ideology to good politics – because she was ‘so eager to demonstrate the superiority of Brussels bureaucracy to the nation state’. At the head of the bureaucracy in question is a German politician created by Merkel. It was the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, who framed the ponderous EU vaccine policy after she was dropped into the Commission post by Merkel i n 2019. Until then, Mrs von der Leyen was best known as the German defence minister who left the German military in a condition that was described by Berlin political veterans as ‘catastrophic’. Instead of providing sufficient men or equipment, she put creches i n barracks to make the army more ‘family-friendly’.
Undeterred, the Chancellor left Mrs von der Leyen as defence minister for five years. Both Nato and the Russian military could draw their own conclusions.
Disaster has followed Merkel ever since she became Chancellor in 2005, yet somehow she slides away from responsibility l i ke Macavity the Cat.
It was her aggressive financial policies at the start of the 2009 eurozone crisis that turned Italy and Greece into economic zombies. Her response to the 2011 Fukushima nuclear meltdown in Japan is another case in point. It sent her into a panic. Trained as a scientist, she had been a long-time supporter of nuclear power. Yet after Fukushima, she declared all of Germany’s nuclear reactors would be shut down by the end of 2022.
Meanwhile, she also wanted to end coal power. And without nuclear power or coal, where would Germany get its power? From Moscow, of course. Now Merkel plans to take gas supplies direct from Russia by way of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, so increasing German’s dependence on the Putin regime.
In recent weeks, Merkel has allowed speculation that the poisoning of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny could make Germany withdraw from the deal. That is not going to happen. The € 10 billion pipeline, built straight from Russia, under the Baltic and into Germany, is nearly complete.
Then came the 2015 decision to open Germany’s borders to more than a million migrants and refugees. It caused shock in Germany and fury in neighbouring countries, who found that the policy put them in the path of hundreds of thousands of Afghans, Syrians and Iraqis making their way to German cities. The Chancellor assured Germans: ‘We can do this.’ But then came the press reports. A 17-yearold Afghan asylum-seeker attacked 20 passengers with a knife on a train near the city of Wurzburg. Six days later, a Syrian asylumseeker set off a bomb, killing himself and injuring 12 others in the city of Ansbach.
There was public revulsion on New Year’s Eve at reports of sexual assault, rape and theft by men identified as ‘Arab or North African appearance’ on the streets of Cologne. At which point, Merkel demanded other EU countries take their share of her problem.
THE financial cost is huge and continuing. It now turns out that more than 90 per cent of critically ill Covid patients in German hospitals – those requiring ventilators – have been from the migrant population.
This domestic disaster t hen turned into a foreign policy disaster. The once keenly pro-EU countries of Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia – the Visegrad Group – have turned into a bloc of angry anti-German states.
Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary, now says: ‘ We are Hungarians – we cannot think with German minds.’
Merkel’s most spectacular failure, though, was her misreading of British opinion on Brexit.
In the run-up to the referendum in 2016, David Cameron toured Europe, asking that the UK be allowed new powers to control EU migration into Britain.
Cameron got a sharp rebuff from EU leaders, led by Merkel. The Chancellor gave the then Prime Minister not so much as a crumb of control because she judged that the British would never vote to leave, no matter how badly she humiliated Cameron. How wrong she was. Merkel will end her four terms as Chancellor this autumn. Who will take her place? That she has encouraged no top-rate successor is another example of her failures.
But then, as Christian Odendahl, chief economist at the Centre for European Reform think-tank, puts it of her Christian Democratic Union party: ‘The CDU is not the party of ideas. It is the party of maintaining the status quo.’
Monolithic, dogmatic, heavyhanded, blind to the needs of ordinary voters – Germany deserves something better than Merkel’s Cold War ideology.
And so does Europe.
Germany deserves something better than Merkel’s Cold War ideology – and so does Europe