Merkel of course came up in the German Democratic Republic (the Eastern German country). She was slightly involved in the protest movement that helped to bring the GDR, and in 1990, after the group she had worked for, joined the CDU, Merkel ran in the 1990 election, the first after the reunification, won her district and in 1991 became federal minister for women and youth. Merkel’s position was at that time based solely on the support of chancellor Helmut Kohl and the fact that she had an unburdened past with no sketchy connections in the old GDR. Her ministry, however, was small (newly split from a bigger ministry) and politically unimportant, especially in a coalition of conservatives and liberals. Merkel herself has never called herself a feminist (with good cause).

In 1994, Merkel took over the ministry for environment, nature conservation and nuclear safety. Her predecessor Klaus Töpfer had been unusually active on this field; and since neither conservatives nor liberals liked his positions (he cared too much about climate change), he was given another ministry and replaced with Merkel. Merkel has therefore been aware of climate change for a long time; it has also been argued that as a scientist by training (she has a PhD in Physics), she would have a better understanding of the problems that come with climate change than many other politicians. In her first term as chancellor, the media (mostly Bild, I suspect) would sometimes refer to her as “climate chancellor” (“Klimakanzlerin”), but unfortunately, Merkel never lived up to that name.

In 1998, Kohl (driven by hybris? By ego?) ran for a fifth term, but was decisively beaten by the SPD led by Gerhard Schröder. The Union thus had to go into opposition for the first time since 1982. Kohl retired and Wolfgang Schäuble took over as party chairman, making Merkel general secretary, one of the most important positions within a party. The CDU was then damaged in a massive corruption scandal caused by Kohl; Schäuble, due to his long-time close connection to Kohl, stepped down as chairman. Merkel, untarnished thanks to her outsider position as someone coming from the East who only joined the Union in 1990, took over as chairwoman and parliamentary opposition leader. In the 2002 election, however, the Union put up CSU leader and Bavarian governor Edmund Stoiber as candidate for chancellor; that this guy almost became chancellor seems almost incredible now, given that he is best known for nonsensical speeches today.

The Union lost in 2002, not least because Schröder was opposed to the very unpopular Iraq War which the conservatives including Merkel wanted Germany to join in, but now Merkel was the unchallenged conservative leader. She had already taken down Friedrich Merz (who has now come back and recently became CDU chairman) as an inner-party rival and thus ran as candidate for chancellor in the 2005 election, the first woman to do so in German history. And of course she went on to become the first female chancellor as well.

The CDU/CSU only narrowly won the 2005 election, an election where a more decisive conservative victory had been expected. Merkel had run on a platform of what over here is usually referred to as neoliberalism: cutting taxes for the rich, cracking down on the unemployed, deregulation, and privatisation of public assets. The Union only came in at 35.2 %, losing 3 % compared to 2002. Therefore, the preferred coalition with the liberals (FDP) didn’t have a majority. Thus, a so-called Grand Coalition of conservatives and socdems formed.

Merkel’s first term saw the economic crisis that resulted from the burst of the real estate and debt bubble in the US. With the Left (Die Linke), a new party had established itself in the political field and changed the makeup of the party system: There were now five firmly established political parties with seats in parliament. Forming a regular two-party coalition would thus become more complicated.

The 2009 election brought a clear victory for the conservatives, but it was less a victory of strength and more one won by the weakness of the SPD, which plummeted to 23 %, her worst result ever at the time. The three smaller parties won big time, with liberals, left and greens all receiving more than 10 %. The liberals were so successful that this time, there was a conservative-liberal majority despite the CDU/CSU’s poor result (33 %).

Politically, Merkel’s second term was characterised by the spectacular downfall of the liberals. Meanwhile, the economic crisis had developed into a financial crisis that threatened to destabilise the Euro currency. The disaster at the nuclear plant in Fukushima also had some interesting consequences in Germany.

The 2013 election was Merkel’s biggest success. On the height of her popularity, Merkel was now seen as an established stateswoman, who had already weathered some crises, and an internationally recognised political leader. The way she would sometimes form a diamond with her hands while talking became iconic for some reason. All inner-party rivals were gone by now, and the Union’s electoral strategy solely relied on Merkel’s popularity: “Sie kennen mich”, the CDU’s campaign posters said. “You know me”: Merkel was presented as the familiar and reliable choice. This resulted in a strong 41.5 % at the polls. Because the liberals, for first time ever, didn’t pass the 5%-threshold, and the newly formed AfD (back then mostly raging against the Euro currency) too narrowly missed it, Merkel’s Union almost won a majority of the parliamentary seats by themselves. Paradoxically, the centre-left actually had a parliamentary majority then, consisting of SPD, greens and the left. However, the three parties couldn’t get together and so, another Grand coalition was formed.

Merkel’s third term was shaped by what was called the “refugee crisis” and by the rise of the far-right. The AfD turned more and more to the right (not that they weren’t bigots to begin with). In the summer of 2015, the mood in Germany was rather optimistic, and Merkel perhaps encapsulated this mood in one of her most famous sentences, simply stating “wir schaffen das”, which roughly translates to “we can do it”, it being taking in more than a million refugees, most of them coming from Syria. The mood, however, quickly changed, and while Merkel is still associated with this phrase and its underlying sentiment, she too quickly turned the other way in her refugee policy. The Bild, Germany’s biggest tabloid and normally on the conservatives side, turned on Merkel as well, returning to spouting racism and bigotry after a brief spell of “refugees welcome”. Merkel’s popularity had been on the zenith and was now in decline.

Her third term actually saw some major legislative milestones, though. The socdems had done a better job negotiating the terms of the coalition and pushed through the introduction of a federal minimum wage. Shortly before the term ended in 2017, the socdems finally decided to make use of the centre-left majority in parliament and, after constant pressure from greens and the left, gay marriage was legalised. If there’s any misconception about Merkel helping to introduce gay marriage in Germany, it is important to know that Merkel voted against it in parliament.

The 2017 campaign was a big up and down. The SPD had decided to make Martin Schulz candidate for chancellor. Schulz had previously been President of the EU Parliament and was therefore untarnished by the unpopular Grand Coalition; he could, in a way, run against it while being part of it. Early in 2017, the polls had the SPD up at 30 % and narrowly beating the conservatives. However, Schulz spectacularly flamed out later in the campaign. In the end, the SPD came in at 20.5 %, her worst ever result in history. Merkel’s Union was down to 32.9 %, a spectacular loss signifying Merkel’s soon-to-come retirement, while the AfD leaped to third place.

After the election, Schulz immediately declared that the SPD had no taste for another Grand Coalition. Thus, Merkel had to try to form a much anticipated “Jamaica Coalition” of Union, Greens and liberals (back in parliament after their 2013 debacle), but the negotiations failed after months of talks because the liberals surprisingly backed out. After some begging by the president, the SPD now came back to the negotiation table. For the sake of stability and to avoid new elections, yet another Grand Coalition came to be, the third under Merkel. The SPD saw some heavy in-fighting about this and was thus able to push through some more legislation against a hollowed out Union.

Merkel declared early on that she would not run for a fifth term as chancellor and would instead retire after the 2021 election. Already in 2018, she gave up the CDU chairwoman position she had held since 2000. Her preferred successor, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, won the position in an internal leadership race against Friedrich Merz, but turned out to be a failure.

Initially, the climate crisis was the pressing issue in Merkel’s last term, due to, among other things, the Fridays for Future protests. Merkel’s record on that issue is of course one of failure. Around that time, it seemed like most Germans would like to see Merkel gone sooner rather than later, but then the Covid-19 pandemic began and overshadowed everything else. While there were some issues with the government’s handling of the pandemic, it gave Merkel’s popularity one last surge. She was therefore able to retire when most people weren’t sick of her, but as Germany’s most popular politician and a highly respected figure.

In 2020, Germany only reached its emission goals due to the shutdown caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. This, in my opinion, speaks to the failure of Merkel’s governments when it comes to environmental policies. After many Friday for Future protests brought the climate crisis to the top of the political agenda, Merkel’s government in 2019 passed a law to address the climate crisis, but the law was so weak that Germany’s constitutional court overturned it and obligated the government to pass a stronger law, as the government’s failure to adequately address the crisis endangers younger and future generations. The new government now wants to improve on Merkel’s policies by speeding up the exit from coal energy.

This perhaps sums up Merkel’s “accomplishments” in this area. When Merkel started out, she had sometimes been called a “climate chancellor” by the press, but she never lived up to that name. Instead, her policies consistently favoured the German car industry (known for cheating and lying about their exhaust values). While Merkel’s last agrarian minister did nothing except advertise for Nestle, the giant agrarian budget of the EU remains devoted to giving most money to big corporations and ignoring their environmental impact and the harm done to animals by industrial farming. If there is any area where we can look back and say “Yeah, Merkel really screwed us on that one”, it is perhaps this one.

One other story may serve to illustrate Merkel’s politics. The red-green government before her had decided to opt out of nuclear energy. This had always been a big issue for the Greens and they came through. Germany was all set to quit nuclear energy in the 2020s. After the 2009 election and some aggressive lobbying by energy companies, however, Merkel’s conservative-liberal coalition decided to reserve that decision. But when a nuclear disaster happened in Fukushima in 2011, public opinion turned hard on nuclear energy. The Greens even won, for the first time ever (and still the only time until now), a governor position, and in the traditionally conservative state of Baden-Württemberg at that. Merkel, seeing from where the wind blows, reserved her reversal and quit nuclear energy again, a purely strategic move to keep the Greens from gaining traction at the polls. Since either this move was poorly planned or just becaue the conservatives wanted to give the energy companies a nice gift, the reversal of the reversal entitled these companies to massive compensations by the state. In the end, Merkel’s flip-flopping on the issue had done nothing but cost the state billions of euros.

In the 2017 campaign, Martin Schulz, the SPD chancellor candidate, declared that there would not be another Grand Coalition (this turned out to be a broken promise, by the way). Merkel was therefore forced to look elsewhere for coalition partners, and indeed multiple states had (and still have) conservative-green coalition, sometimes also including the liberals. The Greens had in many ways moved toward the centre and looked like the logical option.

However, the Greens explicitly stated that they would not take part in any coalition that didn’t commit to legalising gay marriage in their manifesto, which the conservatives opposed. In the Spring of 2017, Merkel mentioned in an interview something about some lesbians she knew and that her views on the issue had softened a bit because of that. This, I think, was probably intended as a strategic move to signal some openness in the matter for the potential future coalition partner. The SPD, who was already in favour of gay marriage but had denied legislative moves to legalise it by the left and the greens her support in order to keep the coalition with the conservatives intact, now decided to make use of the centre-left majority in parliament and just go for it, coalitionary peace be damned. With the parliamentary majority for gay marriage secure thanks to socdems, left and greens, the conservatives decided that their MPs could vote freely on the issue according to their individual values (which is a rather rare move in German politics, most times the MPs follow the party line). Even within the conservative faction, the vote was split. Ursula von der Leyen, for example, now President of the EU Commission, voted for gay marriage, whereas Merkel voted against it. I suspect that this was another strategic move, this time intended for potential conservative voters: Merkel was at time already under heavy fire from the right and seen as too much of a centrist, so maybe this vote was supposed to reaffirm her conservative credentials. Whatever her reasons were, she remains a homophobe, whether out of conviction or for political strategy.

So if there’s any misconception about Merkel doing anything to improve gay rights, forget it. She voted against gay marriage. There also might be a misconception about Merkel regarding feminism. Of course, as the first female chancellor Merkel shattered the glass ceiling; she has proven that women can be ruthless and successful politicians and that she can face off against dictators and wanna-be dictators on the stage of world politics. That alone is an accomplishment and certainly an important step forward regarding representation.

However, when asked later in her chancellorship, Merkel has always denied that she is a feminist. This might just be because she is a conservative and feminism is a bad word for them and most of their voters. The policies of Merkel’s party and government confirm her statements, though. The CDU/CSU has consistently blocked reform of Germany’s abortion laws. (The new government plans to ease at least one restriction.) The Union has blocked the introduction of gender quotas and watered down legislation aimed at closing the gender pay gap, preferring to leave it up to the free market to solve gender inequality. Instead of lowering the cost for childcare, the Union implemented a financial impetus for mothers to stay at home. Where progress has been made, it should be attributed to the SPD as the conservatives’ coalition partner. Now that the Union is in the opposition, the new government also plans a reform regarding trans people that would be a big improvement upon the status quo. As long as Merkel was in office, such improvements for women and LGBTQ people had a much smaller chance to go through.

The conservatives under Merkel’s leadership were obsessed with presenting balanced budgets. While this aim in itself might not be wrong, coupled with an insistence on not rising taxes (especially for the rich) it has prevented necessary investments in education, research, healthcare, infrastructure, the social safety net etc.

Perhaps to Merkel’s credit one could argue that her governments were willing to make investments and give guarantees in times of crises. In a way, her fiscal policy could therefore be seen as Keynesian: The state invests (on credit) in bad times and saves money to reduce the deficit in good times. In this regard, it was important that the finance ministers during the 2008/9 financial and economic crisis and during the Covid-pandemic were socdems who pushed for investments, while from 2009 to 2017 the conservative Wolfgang Schäuble held that position.

Schäuble was thus in office in the years when some European nations, Greece in particular, struggled with debt as a result of the earlier economic and financial crisis. Schäuble, obviously with the backing of his successor as CDU leader, insisted on pushing down austerity politics down Greece’s throat. The details are honestly beyond my expertise, but from what I’ve read, Schäuble and Merkel were probably very wrong in their approach that contributed to ruining Greece’s economy and was, at least on Schäuble’s part after 2015, partly motivated by punishing the Greeks for electing a government led by a leftist (Alexis Tsipras). The Euro as a common currency currently benefits Germany at the cost of other European countries; the resistance to give up national sovereignty over economic, social and fiscal policy meanwhile blocks change to address the problems created by the common currency. Profiting at the expense of one’s neighbours is not how the EU should work, but German conservatives care very little about that and instead proudly pronounce how much Germany is exporting. That the high volume of exporting is only possible because of the relatively low wages is of course not mentioned, but contributes to a growing gap between rich and poor.

If the previous box gave Merkel some credit for investing in times of crisis, that doesn’t mean that these moves didn’t have problematic aspects. In 2008/9 in particular, a large part of the investments aimed at helping the German auto industry, which is, especially by conservatives, hailed as an important job creator. The German obsession with the car, however, is bad for the environment, bad for the air quality in cities, and bad for public health, and that is regardless of how much the corporations cheat when it comes to their cars’ exhaust values. Despite that, Merkel’s notoriously terrible traffic ministers always put the car first while the federal rail company was denied further investments.

The “jobs” argument is the same that conservatives use to justify selling weapons all over the world, by the way. (Ironically, even at the height of the Euro crisis, Germany sold submarines to Greece, that was at the same time forced to save every cent and sell off as many public assets of value as possible…)

I also just want to mention another Merkel phrase that has gained notoriety, in this case a rather unflattering one, though. Merkel once referred to the internet as “Neuland”, which translates to something like uncharted territory. As the internet wasn’t exactly new at this point, but rather something people used every day, Merkel was promptly mocked for saying this. Her remark reflected her government’s general attitude towards the internet and digitalisation, an area where Germany is considered to be lagging far behind.

Generally, Merkel’s economic policy consisted of watering down the regulations and requirements for corporations that the coalition partner wanted to implement, based on the conviction that the free market will solve problems on its own. Accordingly, the conservatives fought the introduction of a federal minimum wage as long as possible and then put in some exceptions where they could. Harshly regulated, however, were the unemployed: unemployed payment were kept so low that the constitutional court had to step in and declare them unconstitutional.

This stands symbolic for an economic policy that saw the gap between rich and poor grow and contributed by redistributing from the bottom to the top. As a thanks, the Union receives huge donations from rich people like the BMW owner family, and Union politicians, including close Merkel allies like Eckart von Klaeden, can take well-paid lobbyist jobs as soon as their political career is over.

Today, Merkel’s most famous utterance is perhaps “Wir schaffen das” (= we can do it) from the Summer of 2015, referring to taking in about a million refugees mostly from Syria. The mood of parts of the populace then was for a short time quite welcoming towards refugees. Even the Bild tabloid pronounced “refugees welcome” for a while.

Merkel’s refugee policy, for which she is sometimes praised from the (centre and) left and attacked from the right, was probably not based on humanitarian principle, though. People overlook that there was actually little the government could do at the time: Germany’s borders are generally open according to the Schengen agreement and I suspect there wasn’t any any force available to stop people from entering the country anyway. Making it a point of national pride to take in refugees was thus just a clever and pragmatic move.

Merkel’s foreign policy afterwards aimed at securing that such a situation wouldn’t come again. To that end, deals were made with Turkey’s dictator Erdogan that he would keep refugees from reaching Europe in exchange for money; that this policy is not only cynical and encurages human rights violations (in Lybia and in Croatia as well), but also gives leverage to a dangerous dictator who likes to wage war against everyone around him (especially Kurds) was ignored. We can observe a similar problem right now when the Belarussian dictator Lukashenko uses the EU’s fear of refugees and migrants against it. As a result of its own hypocrisy, the EU and its members now have to back the government of Poland, that has declared on the refugees at its belarussian border in a fascist fashion, even though the EU should actually impose sanctions on Poland for its governments’ violations of the rule of law.

This fits into a general pattern of foreign policy where human rights come second at best. What one could see as a commitment to dialogue even with autocratic regimes like Russia, Turkey, Iran or China is first and foremost dictated by the interests of German businesses that need to export. The same principles were the foundation of Merkel’s foreign policy regarding developing countries: Ensuring German exports and making sure as few refugees and migrants as possible make it to Germany.

In the EU, the Union and its European equivalent, the EPP, have long blocked necessary reforms and further integration. Victor Orban’s Fidesz party was allowed to remain under the EPP’s roof for years, even though Orban turned Hungary into a right-wing autocratic regime and spouts antisemitism. The CSU even used to invite him as a guest speaker to their conventions. At least Merkel is not to blame for putting von der Leyen in charge of the EU Commission, that blunder is on Macron.

In all 16 years of Merkel’s chancellorship, the CDU/CSU always held the interior ministry. Between 2000 and 2007, the neo-Nazi terror group NSU committed ten murders and many more crimes, before finally two members committed suicide and their crimes were detected, thereby exposing the police and Germany’s interior intelligence agency (the “Verfassungsschutz”) as blind on their right eye. This was not an accident or bad work by a few bad apples, but a systematic failure of security agencies caused by a political agenda. This agenda is easily summed up: both-sidism.

Conservatives, led by Merkel, always insist on playing up left-wing violence that is usually aimed against things, not people, while downplaying the threat from the right that endangers humans, most of all minorities. A few burning cars at the G20 meeting in Hamburg are made out to be terrifying terrorism, while neo Nazis who set fire to refugee hostels are called “concerned citizens” whose “concerns” need to be addressed. The former head of the “Verfassungsschutz”, whose job it had been to deal with threats to democracy, recently tried to run for parliament as a CDU member while spouting far-right populist messages, this was the guy chosen under Merkel after the NSU murders had come out to confront right-wing threats to democracy. Police, security agencies and the army are evidentially full of right-wingers and neo Nazis, but the conservatives only ever idea to address this problem is giving them more money and never to hold them accountable.

Accordingly, whenever there is some sort of politically motivated murder or terrorist attack, the conservatives always want to increase surveillance and give the security agencies and police more rights, more power, and limit the rights and the freedom of citizens. They blame migrants, refugees and Islam (Merkel once said that Islam does not belong to Germany which was certainly not meant as an embrace of secularism) and think the solution is to make the EU a fortress that nobody can enter to ask for asylum, instead of cracking down on the fascists who want to murder Jews and people from diverse backgrounds.

Merkel was an extraordinarily successful politician. She managed to get to the top and to stay there for 16 years, to be re-elected three times, and then retire on her own terms when she was still popular. This is a huge accomplishment and it is hard to believe that a big scandal will turn up soon and tarnish Merkel’s reputation like what happened with Kohl. Even harder to believe is that Merkel would take on sketchy jobs like her predecessor or some of her former colleagues and rivals, because Merkel, whatever her faults (and I think I listed some of them above), possesses personal integrity.

“You know me” didn’t work as a campaign slogan because people actually know her. Politicians in Germany don’t talk about their personal history or motivations as much as in the US: the voting system is organised in a way that you normally vote for a party, not for a person. The chancellor is also not the president, and the chancellor’s family is not really a public person. I wouldn’t recognise Merkel’s husband if he were standing right next to me. “You know me” worked because Merkel has never had any scandals, because she is calm and collected and had been around for a long time.

Merkel’s personal integrity stands out all the more once you compare it to her party’s record. The CDU had illegally taken on donations from rich people for decades, which resulted in the scandal that damaged Kohl so badly. Conservative MPs took bribes from dictatorships; ministers had to step down for forging their PhDs, and during the pandemic a couple of MPs were involved in shady mask deals. Merkel never did anything like that, which speaks for her character. Merkel also never did anything to address the corruption that is so pervasive in her party, though. On the contrary, the Union under Merkel long blocked any parliamentary move to curb lobbyism and prevent parliamentary corruption and bribery. The Union is full of people who go into politics not to achieve meaningful change, but to enrich themselves. They still make it into high offices in the CDU/CSU because the party is programmatically so hollowed out; it is a party that runs in elections for the sake of power.

What is more important than getting elected, however, is what a politician does with the power that comes with the elected office in my opinion. I think running for office and then running for re-election just to stay in power is somewhat conservative; if you have no goal, then perhaps you want everything to stay the same and you’re just trying to stay in office to block somewhat from happening, and that is (perhaps moderate) conservatism, and indeed this is essentially just what the CDU/CSU is.

There is one of these German words that describes very well what they are: a “Kanzlerwahlverein”. They are a loose association with the sole goal of electing a chancellor, is what that word expresses; they have no real ideology, no vision, no goal. For the last 20 years or so, Merkel has been one of, if not the most powerful person in this party, at times downright dominating it. The Union was a “Kanzlerwahlverein” before her, and they certainly remained one during Merkel’s 16 years in office. This is already telling about Merkel: she ran the party that had no vision, that was a programmatically empty shell, hence she had no vision.

It is helpful to remember Merkel’s beginnings as a chancellor and as a chancellor candidate before that. In 2005, the red-green coalition was losing state elections left and right; the left was starting to emerge as a new party, and after seven years of socialdemocratic rule, everything seemed set for a conservative takeover. Unemployment was pretty high, so socdems and Greens had pushed through a bunch of neoliberal reforms, (as was the style at the time; see also Tony Blair’s New Labour) deregulating the job market while coming down hard on the unemployed (these reforms are generally known as Agenda 2010), deregulating and privatising in general, cutting taxes for the rich and rising the health insurance contributions for employees etc. The Union already worsened these reforms through the second parliamentary chamber, where SPD and Greens had hardly any votes left after losing all the state elections. Merkel, accordingly, ran in 2005 on a platform of cold-hearted neoliberalism and further reform to crack down on the unemployed, deregulate, and lower taxes for the rich. However, whether due to that unpopular platform or because the SPD’s Gerhard Schröder was just good at campaigning, Merkel only narrowly won and almost lost a victory most people thought secure; a fact burned into many people’s memory by Schröder’s arrogant drunken performance in the post-election tv discussion, where he told Merkel, despite the result’s obvious implications, that there would be no way that the socdems would elect her to the chancellorship.

After the narrow 2005, the openly neoliberal Merkel was gone, basically never to be seen again. The 2005 election remained the only campaign when the Union under Merkel went in with a clear platform; afterwards, it was power for the sake of power, the political content reduced to ‘everything should remain the same’ or, put in classic CDU campaign poster slogans, “Sie kennen mich” and “Keine Experimente” (already a Adenauer slogan).

There were tactics behind this lack of programme, too. Merkel’s uncommitted centrist conservatism very much worked to her advantage in the 2009 campaign: the socdems too had moved towards the middle under Schröder, but now Merkel occupied that position with the advantage of being the incumbent. The clear fronted situation of left vs right was gone, since conservatives and socdems were in a coalition with each other. Instead of polarisation, politics seemed boring, in a way; there was no clear path for a voter who wanted change, as the socdems had lost much of their credibility and no coalition without the conservatives seemed realistic. The late 2000 and early 2010s therefore saw a phenomenon that political scientists and journalists called “Politikverdrossenheit” (= political apathy), with lower turnout in elections. This was good for Merkel: she picked up votes from reliable conservatives and from disengaged voters who didn’t care that much, while a lot of disappointed voters stayed home on election day, a strategy called asymmetrical mobilisation. It worked until the AfD tapped into the pool of voters to the right of the Union; due to the polarisation, the apathy is now mostly gone. With Merkel and her personal integrity gone, but still without any real political content, the conservatives thankfully lost the 2021 election.