Unmasking clues to Angela Merkel’s methods
CHISINAU, Moldova — On a blazing afternoon, as the euro crisis was surging back from summer vacation, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany descended on this impoverished sliver of a nation in her continuing quest to expand the European family. Folk costumes, children proffering roses and an honor guard figured in a welcome that evoked faded Communist pomp and still more distant Hapsburg glory. In a land that the chancellor acknowledged had once suffered “the dictatorship of Nazi Germany,” the scene unfurled before a mighty Airbus with “Luftwaffe” emblazoned on its tail.
But this afternoon it was 21st-century Germany, Merkel’s Germany, that was coming to call. The greeting was emblematic of how the 58-year-old chancellor, who entered politics in 1990, has become the most powerful German woman since Catherine the Great ruled Russia, and the European leader seen by aides as most dedicated to forging a future for her old Continent in a new, globally connected world.
If Merkel, who is routinely depicted as dour but in person often conveys a mischievous wit, found irony in Moldova, she kept it to herself.
But she no doubt recognized echoes of her own youth in Communist East Germany, where a culture of keeping silent and a long reign of mediocrity led inexorably to its decline.
Her critics dismiss Merkel as overly pragmatic rather than visionary, ever mindful of her need to keep German voters on her side as she enters an election year. But if she seems opaque even to her allies, hints of her approach to Europe’s economic crisis are sprinkled in a life that includes firsthand experience of how a failure of vision can undo a nation. They are also seen in her embrace of the values of thrift instilled in her smalltown upbringing with her father, a Lutheran pastor, and her training as a physicist.
With a scientist’s mind, Merkel is keenly conscious that Europe is aging and will not stay competitive — and thus credible — unless it overcomes its financial and monetary disorder. In her evolving view, the solution is what she calls “more Europe” — a catchphrase that masks a deep lack of agreement among the Continent’s bickering nations on what their common future could be.
The Moldova trip in August fit neatly with an approach to governing that is easily misread as Merkel lavishes attention on even seemingly peripheral matters in pursuit of larger goals.
Merkel, who was accompanied by a business delegation, knows that Germany, an exporter, depends on developing new European strengths as the Continent’s traditional standing wanes. The European Union, she is fond of noting, comprises only 8 to 9 percent of the world’s population of 7 billion; for now, Europe still accounts for 25 percent of gross domestic product globally but a staggering 50 percent of social spending.
“If we don’t pay attention to what is going on,” she told bankers, lawyers and thinkers invited by Deutsche Bank last month to discuss Germany’s future, “then we will not be able to keep our standard of living.” In her political career, this willingness to challenge convention has helped Merkel, the head of the Christian Democrats, break ideological molds. As a scientist, she has “no barriers on her thinking,” said Wolfgang Nowak, a former senior advisor to her Social Democratic predecessor, Gerhard Schroder.
Evelyn Roll, a journalist who early on spotted Merkel’s political potential and has spent many hours with her, writing a 2001 biography, credits Merkel’s scientific mind for much of her unlikely success: In a conservative country, a childless Lutheran divorcee raised in the East became the first female chancellor in 2005 as leader of a party run largely by traditional family men from the Roman Catholic strongholds of West Germany.
Most of those men are lawyers. For them, Roll said in an interview, there is right and there is wrong; if a lawyer loses an argument, he fails. Merkel, by contrast, views a loss like a scientist — a discovery that shows what will not work. “She thinks backwards from the end result,” Roll said.
Conflict is akin to a mathematical challenge — how to corral both extremes of opinion into the same tent? The chancellor’s caution, which her critics contend has hindered fast progress in easing or ending the euro crisis, stems from this approach, in which a course is set only once she considers it certain to succeed.
In conversation, or during a speech, Merkel is above all alert, looking around, taking in all present. When she lacks an immediate answer, or is weighing words especially carefully, her eyes rise, searching for the right formulation as a pupil might scan her memory for an exam answer. Often, too, a smile dances across an enigmatic face.
Roll has recounted how Merkel, when she was 14 just after the Prague Spring reforms had been crushed in 1968, began telling her class about her summer vacation in Czechoslovakia. The teacher grew agitated; the future chancellor quickly adopted a poker face.
Listening, Roll wrote, she understood the origins of Merkel’s famously unreadable expression.
“Yes,” Merkel said, “it is a great advantage from the time in East Germany that one learned to keep quiet. That was one of the strategies for survival. As it is today.”
Merkel spent her formative years in Templin, a medieval town of about 17,000 about 50 miles north of Berlin in a lake-dotted region known as the Uckermark. Just off the central square, in a timbered building that houses the local Sparkasse savings bank, the beams bear carved mottos that Greeks and Spaniards now fear ring loud in Merkel’s ears.
“The saver of today is the winner of tomorrow,” reads one. “It is not what you earn, but what you save, that makes you independent,” says another.