The Times Magazine 45the perpetrator.) She also sticks to the official
script that there was no genocide conducted
by Bosnian Serbs at Srebrenica and seeks to
play down other atrocities of war – so much
so that she has had her knuckles rapped by
a war-crimes tribunal. Her government was
re-elected last year, while the main opposition
parties refused to take part, claiming that they
had been denied access to the media.
Female icons can crash and burn, taking
many hopes with them. Aung San Suu Kyi
will go down as the brave Burmese leader who
took her country out of military dictatorship,
but her legacy is now tainted by the past few
years of indifference – or worse – to the fate
of the persecuted Muslim Rohingya minority.
Now the generals have grabbed back power
in a coup, leaving a shabby legacy for the
woman awarded the Nobel peace prize. Derek
Mitchell, a senior US diplomat who knows
Aung San Suu Kyi, nailed the tendency to
ascribe excessive faith in virtues or vices to
women in power when he said of the Burmese
icon, “She may not have changed. She may
have been consistent and we just didn’t know
the full complexity of who she is.”
Where do these reality checks leave
women running many of the big institutions of
political economy? Christine Lagarde, head of
the European Central Bank and formerly the
International Monetary Fund, once claimed
that, “If Lehman Brothers had been Lehman
Sisters, it would have been a different world
now.” The clever thing about this statement
is that there is simply no way of knowing
whether it is true. Female bankers might be
more risk-averse – but we only have her word
for it. Perhaps the more modest truth is that
women simply have not proved as bad at
messing up international finance as the men
who still largely rule Wall Street and the City.
Lagarde is in many ways the polished
template for the kind of female appointment
sweeping global institutions. Experienced,
hardy and adept at winning power struggles,
she’s the protégé of the former French
president Nicolas Sarkozy. She emits a
mixture of seriousness and charm that works
at high altitude. My first sighting of her was
graciously stopping every few minutes at the
World Economic Forum as leading business
figures and top-flight bankers showered her
with air kisses.
Her relationship with Merkel is a
mixture of mutual interests and a degree of
competition between France and Germany
for the plum roles in managing the rocky
finances of the eurozone. “There are many
circles and many forums where it’s only the
two of us who are women,” Lagarde has said.
“So there’s a sense of recognition, complicity,
solidarity.” They do each other favours, says
someone who deals with both on a regular
basis. “But they’re not close – they’re verydifferent people.” She looks at home in a world
of elegant, if brutal, French political society.
A cameo in Call My Agent seems never far
off. Merkel, meanwhile, often stops to do her
own shopping at the cheap supermarket on
the way home from the Chancellery – being
conveniently snapped with an austere basket
of sausage, cheese, peppers and budget red
wine from a German vineyard.
Merkel is the female power-broker I have
known longest – since first watching her in
the tumult of 1990 and the transition from
East German communism when she emerged
as deputy press speaker for the East’s Christian
Democrats. Back then she was “the girl”- Helmut Kohl’s pet name for her – or “the
milkmaid” because she blushed so often. After
15 years as chancellor, with approval ratings
still higher than many other European leaders
and a fanbase outside Germany, she can
afford to consider herself as the milkmaid
who became Europe’s first Powerfrau.
“Mutti” can also be funny and surprisingly
off-the-cuff for someone whose public
language is stiff. When I once pressed
her for a clearer reply on one of the many
wrinkles in the Anglo-German relationship
she let rip about London blaming Berlin
for “something you [British] started”, and
concluded hotly, “I know you’ll look at me
with that sceptical British way...” On another
occasion, I found myself at one of the
main debates on the eve of the last election
inside a narrow cordon with Merkel and her
“political bodyguard”, Ursula von der Leyen,
then a cabinet minister who had been shrewd
enough to support Merkel’s rise while her
party’s male establishment disparaged her
as a minor force from the old East.
Unplanned interviews are not the German
way of things, but we all talked amiably enough - Merkel told me that the election “wouldn’t
be easy” – until a tray of wine arrived, a prop
for the late evening news to show Merkel
toasting a win in the debate. A sideways
glance from “VdL” and a security man firmly
disinvited me. Afterwards I asked von der
Leyen if she’d been angry. “Oh no,” she replied
soothingly. “We just wanted our wine.”
It struck me as an illustration of the
Merkel-von der Leyen alliance in practice- one that also succeeded, to the fury of many
male colleagues who believe that it was an
exercise in patronage – after watching von der
Leyen struggle with the unrewarding job of
German defence minister. Martin Schulz, the
Social Democrat leader who lost out to Merkel
in that debate and ultimately the election too,
derided her as Merkel’s “weakest minister”.
Female succession for the German leadership
has been elusive: Merkel’s attempt to install
“AKK” (Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer)
failed when she crashed out of the candidacy
and stood aside. These days, few doubt that
on the European stage von der Leyen’s “line
manager” (as a former aide puts it) is still
the German chancellor. For better or worse,
strong female alliances are starting to define
politics. But anyone inclined to carp at the
qualifications of the favoured new crowd
of female cronies might pause to reflect it
is simply what male networks have been up
to for centuries.
We have come a long way in the
30 years since Margaret Thatcher waved
her tearful goodbye in 1990 – the same year
I watched Merkel emerge, blinking, into
the spotlight as the rising star of post-Wall
German public life. Since then, national
electorates and an institutional push for
equality have brought new faces to the
fore. Female power is slowly starting to look
a bit more diverse too. The World Trade
Organisation just appointed Ngozi Okonjo-
Iweala as its first woman head – a Nigerian-
American trade expert beating another female
candidate to the job in a decision brokered
personally by President Biden. Sure, there is
enough sexism around for the female Finnish
PM, Sanna Marin, to be described by a former
Estonian interior minister as a “sales girl” - but these days, there’s enough annoyance
at such a slight to force him into an apology.
As someone who has enjoyed a ringside
seat at the world stage, I’m less convinced than
some of the claim to female superiority – but
this new breed of leaders deserve their chance
to shine. It’s been more than time. n
Anne McElvoy is senior editor of The
Economist and a former Times correspondent
in Berlin, the Balkans and MoscowTHERE’S A VIEW THAT FEMALE LEADERS HAVE
DEALT BETTER WITH COVID. HOW TRUE IS IT?
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the new director-general of the
World Trade Organisation, in Maryland last monthREUTERS