8 The New York Review“Angela Merkel thinks we’re at work.”
In Greece, rather less good- natured
protesters displayed caricatures of her
as Hitler—a grotesque travesty, but
one that arose from Germany’s insis-
tence that everything would be OK in
the eurozone if only everyone could
learn to be more German.
By lending her authority to the
idea that the debtors must be made
to purge their guilt and mend their
ways, Merkel fueled two contradic-
tory passions. On the one side, she
created deep resentment in the debtor
countries by dressing up the defense
of narrow German fiscal interests as
a moral cause. The self- righteousness
that was served as an accompaniment
to the bitter dish of economic austerity
made it even more difficult to swallow.
The treatment of Greece in particular
could be cited by those who were al-
ways opposed to the EU as evidence
that it was, in the end, nothing more
than a front for German hegemony.
(This distortion of reality was a signif-
icant theme for Brexiteers.)
Yet on the other side, the moraliza-
tion of the debt crisis could also feed,
in Germany itself, a self- pitying nar-
rative in which the frugal, responsible
Germans were being taken for a ride by
the feckless Southern Europeans. This
was the founding mentality of the Al-
ternative für Deutschland (AfD) party,
which emerged to challenge Merkel in
2013, and it subsequently fused with
anti- immigrant sentiment to create a
more virulent form of grievance that
propelled the far right into the Bund-
estag for the first time since the fall of
the Nazis.
Hence the larger paradox of the
Merkel era: the leadership of a centrist
Christian Democrat as the undisputed
first among equals in the EU coincided
with the loss of Christian Democracy’s
dominance of the right- of- center space
in European politics. The rise of far-
right parties like the AfD, the League
in Italy, Poland’s Law and Justice, the
National Rally in France, Spain’s Vox,
and Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz in Hungary
has created a profound identity crisis
in what used to be the dominant con-
servative parties, leaving them unsure
whether they should fight against what
Orbán calls “illiberal democracy” or
shore up their own support by embrac-
ing it. In a short essay on Merkel’s de-
parture, Orbán claimed that while Kohl
had been “a dear, old friend, a Christian
brother,” Merkel had created a “rup-
ture” on the European right by support-
ing the “migratory invasion” of 2015.
The temptation to heal that breach
by adopting the rhetoric of the far
right is, for the old centrist conser-
vatives, very strong. In France, for
example, Valérie Pécresse—the presi-
dential candidate of the Republicans,
the mainstream center- right party,
whose former leader Nicolas Sarkozy
was once Merkel’s closest European
ally—has now legitimized the white su-
premacist trope of the “great replace-
ment” of white Christians by people of
color and Muslims. It is increasingly
hard to see, among Europe’s estab-
lished conservative parties, Merkelism
surviving without Merkel.The wider question Merkel has left
unanswered is whether it is possible, in
the new wartime that Putin has inau-
gurated, for a leader of the democratic
world to combine ambition and visionon the one hand with modesty and de-
cency on the other. She mattered so
deeply because she had no interest in
what has animated Putin and so many
of his fellow nationalist authoritarians:
the pursuit of greatness. The promise
to make Russia (or America or Britain
or China) great again has been at the
core of reactionary politics over the
past decade.
Merkel always knew that Germany,
above all, must not be great. She visi-
bly winced in 2011 when, during the
eurozone debt crisis, the leader of her
party’s parliamentary bloc, Volker
Kauder, boasted, “Now, all of a sudden,
Europe is speaking German.” Merkel’s
desire was to make Germany not great,
but ordinary. Her relentless personal
modesty—she continued as chancellor
to live in an unpretentious flat in a pre-
war building in east Berlin and to push
her shopping cart around the local su-
permarket—was her intimate and min-
iature version of how she thought her
country should be. No contemporary
leader had less truck with national ex-
ceptionalism. “I don’t think,” she once
said, “Germans are particularly bad,
or outstandingly wonderful.... I grew
up here. I like living here. I have con-
fidence in this country, I am part of
its history, with all its pain and all the
good things.” That understated sanity
became, over the course of her chan-
cellorship, paradoxically remarkable.
Being unflashy made Merkel, however
reluctantly, a shining beacon.
Must, however, the eschewal of
greatness involve the loss of any sense
of large- scale and long- term purpose?
Merkel once described herself as being
“as focused and as concentrated as a
tightrope walker, only thinking about
the next step.” No one walked the high
wire as sure- footedly as she did—and
even after sixteen years she had not
fallen off but chose to dismount grace-
fully. But that exclusive focus on think-
ing about the next step also meant that
she had little sense of what might await
at the end of the rope.
Nowhere was this more true than
in her relations with Putin. In the cri-
sis that followed his annexation of
Crimea in 2014, Merkel became the
West’s Putin whisperer. She spoke to
him, according to Marton, thirty- eight
times during that crisis and did more
than anyone else to create the Minsk
accords, which established the resto-
ration of Ukraine’s sovereignty as a
mutually recognized goal. They were
a great testament to her skill, tenacity,
and selfless care for the lives of those
who would be threatened by a wider
war. But they barely outlasted her
chancellorship.
It has not taken long for Europe
to pay Merkel the tribute of becom-
ing painfully aware of both what she
achieved and what she left unresolved,
of what she meant to the defense of de-
mocracy and the fragile condition in
which she left it. In The Life of Gali-
leo, her compatriot Bertolt Brecht has
the young Andrea sigh, “Unhappy the
land that has no heroes!” and Gal-
ileo reply, “No. Unhappy the land
that needs heroes.” For much of her
remarkable career, Merkel was the
marvelous exemplar of happily unhe-
roic leadership. Now Western Europe
finds itself very unhappily in need not
of a swaggering hero, but of someone
who can, in a suddenly altered world,
fill her silences with urgency and
purpose. QDiscover Early
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