A nation transformed under Merkel moves on
STUTTGART, GERMANY >> The small silver star at the tip of Aleksandar Djordjevic’s Mercedes shines bright. He polishes it every week.
Djordjevic makes combustion engines for Daimler, one of Germany’s flagship carmakers. He has a salary of about $70,000 U.S., eight weeks of vacation and a guarantee negotiated by the union that he cannot be fired until 2030. He owns a two-story house and that E-class 250 model Mercedes in his driveway.
All of that is why Djordjevic polishes the star on his car.
“The star is something stable and something strong: It stands for Made in Germany,” he said.
But by 2030 there will be no more combustion engines at Daimler, or people making combustion engines.
“I’m proud of what I do,” Djordjevic said. “It’s unsettling to know that in 10 years’ time my job will no longer exist.”
Djordjevic is the picture of a new German pride and prosperity — and German anxiety.
As Chancellor Angela Merkel prepares to leave office after 16 years, her country is among the richest in the world. A broad and contented middle class is one facet of Merkel’s Germany that has been central to her longevity and her ability to deliver on a core promise of stability. But her impact has been far greater.
To travel the country she leaves behind is to see it profoundly transformed.
There is the father taking paid parental leave in Catholic Bavaria. The married gay couple raising two children outside Berlin. The woman in a hijab teaching math in a high school near Frankfurt, where most students have German passports but few have German parents.
There is the coal worker in the former communist East voting for a far-right party that did not exist when Merkel took office. And two young brothers on a North Sea island threatened by rising sea levels who do not remember a time when Merkel was not chancellor and cannot wait to see her gone.
As Merkel steered her country through successive crises and left others unattended, there was change that she led and change that she allowed.
She decided to phase out nuclear power in Germany. She ended compulsory military service. She was the first chancellor to assert that Islam “belongs” to Germany. When it came to breaking down her country’s and party’s conservative family values, she was more timid but ultimately did not stand in the way.
“She saw where the country was going and allowed it to go there,” said Roland Mittermayer, an architect who married his husband shortly after Merkel invited conservative lawmakers to pass a law permitting samesex marriage, even though she herself voted against it.
No other democratic leader in Europe has lasted longer. And Merkel is walking out of office as the most popular politician in Germany.
Many of her postwar predecessors had strongly defined legacies. Konrad Adenauer anchored Germany in the West. Willy Brandt reached across the Iron Curtain. Helmut Kohl, her onetime mentor, became synonymous with German unity. Gerhard Schröder paved the way for the country’s economic success.
Merkel’s legacy is less tangible but equally transformative. She changed Germany into a modern society, and a country less defined by its history.
She may be remembered most for her decision to welcome more than 1 million refugees in 2015-16 when most other Western nations rejected them. It was a brief redemptive moment for the country that had committed the Holocaust and turned her into an icon of liberal democracy.
Leaving Offenbach, the next stop is Hanau. It was here, in February last year, that a far-right gunman went into several bars and shot nine mostly young people who had migrant backgrounds.
The backlash against the diversification and modernization that Merkel has overseen has turned increasingly violent. Germany suffered three far-right terrorist attacks in less than three years. The ideological breeding ground for that violence is in many ways embodied by a party that chose its name in opposition to the chancellor.
Merkel often justified unpopular policies by calling them “alternativlos:” without alternative.
The Alternative for Germany, or AfD, was founded in 2013 in opposition to the bailout of Greece that Merkel’s government engineered during Europe’s sovereign-debt crisis. When she welcomed more than 1 million refugees in 2015 and 2016, the party adopted a noisy anti-immigrant stance that catapulted it into Germany’s parliament.
The AfD is marginalized in the country’s West. But it has become the secondstrongest party in the former communist East, the place where Merkel grew up.
Politically at least, Merkel’s Germany is more divided between East and West than at any other point since reunification.
The lingering inequality between East and West three decades after reunification is still evident, even though taxpayers’ money has flowed east and things have gradually improved. With the government planning to phase out coal production by 2038, billions more in funding are promised to help compensate for the job losses.
But as Mike Balzke, a worker at the nearby coal plant in Jänschwalde, put it: “We don’t want money; we want a future.”
Balzke recalled his optimism when Merkel first became chancellor. Because she was an easterner and a scientist, he expected her to be an ambassador for the East, and for coal.
Instead, his village lost one-quarter of its population during her chancellorship. A promised train line from Forst to Berlin was never built. The post office shut down.
Balzke, 41, worries that the region will turn into a wasteland.
That anxiety runs deep. And it deepened again with the arrival of refugees in 2015.
Merkel’s decision to welcome the refugees was one reason Balzke stopped voting for her. But for plenty of other people, the opposite was true.
Mathis Winkler, a development aid worker in Berlin, had never voted for Merkel’s party. As a gay man, he was appalled by its narrow conservative definition of family that until only a few years ago excluded him, his longterm partner and their two foster sons.
But after Merkel became the target of far-right anger during the refugee crisis, he joined her party in solidarity.
Merkel pushed her own base on several fronts. On her watch, legislation was passed that allows mothers and fathers to share 14 months of paid parental leave. The conservative wing of her party was up in arms, but only a decade later, it has become the new normal.
Merkel never backed same-sex marriage outright, but she allowed lawmakers to vote for it, knowing that it would go through.