Mutti’s last days
Angela Merkel is on the way out, and so is her vision for the European Union
DOUGLAS MURRAY
accounting practices would, to put it politely,
never fully meld — and that an orderly sepa-
ration of the union might be in order.
The immovable ‘Mutti’ (as the Germans
used to fondly call her) took neither course.
Instead she oversaw a system that imposed
sado-austerity on southern Europe, left the
eurozone ill-prepared for the next crisis, and
set the stage for events that would lead to
her own downfall.
German unemployment now stands at a
historic low of under 5 per cent. In Italy, by
contrast, it’s 10 per cent, a decade after the
slump — and an appalling 31 per cent among
the youth, far higher than the 19 per cent at
which it stood before the crash. The fiscal
straitjacket that Merkel forced upon the
Italians (imposed by bureaucrats whom
she and Brussels had in turn imposed on
the Italian public) helped create an entire
generation of Italians who started their
lives with no chance of work. And who
were receptive to new political parties
who would point to a whole new way of
doing things.
Had Italy been able to respond to the
crash in its own way, things might have
been very different. As Joseph Stiglitz
has observed, the project of which Mer-
kel was the champion tied together coun-
tries with ‘vastly different economic and
social backgrounds, denying them the
vital ability to manipulate their exchange
and interest rates’. What may have felt
like burden-sharing in Berlin felt very dif-
ferent in Athens and Rome. And now the
political consequences of this have finally
led back towards their instigator.
But the mistake which was to prove the
turning point for her chancellorship, and
the European project, was the migration
crisis. At its peak, in 2015, Merkel showed
not only her immovability, but a unilat-
eralism which was staggering. Through-
out that period, Merkel seemed to think
that she had the right to continue mak-
ing decisions on behalf of an entire conti-
nent. When she unilaterally announced the
suspension of normal border and asylum
procedures in August that year, inviting ref-
ugees to Germany and declaring ‘We can
do this’, she consulted few of her counter-
parts and listened to the warnings of none.
Only as Germany became overwhelmedW
hatever anyone’s views on the
enterprise, there was one ques-
tion always begging to be asked
of the European Union: ‘What do you want
to be when you grow up?’ At an early stage
it wasn’t clear to everyone. Then the pur-
pose and direction of travel seemed agreed
— under the stewardship of Angela Merkel.
She was there to settle disputes, authorise
bailouts, offer German help to struggling
nations and protect the project as it led to
ever-closer union. Whatever else can be said
of it, with Merkel at the helm at least the EU
appeared to have direction. Not anymore.
This week — after another political drub-
bing for the CDU in Hesse — the German
Chancellor announced that she would not
seek re-election as head of the party she
has led for 18 years. She also announced
she would be stepping down as Chancel-
lor at the next election, in 2021, a position
she has held since 2005. During that time
in office she has worked with four French
presidents, four British prime ministers,
and seven people who tried to run Italy.
Her demise is proving a drawn-out affair
— but we can see, in parallel, the demise
of her vision of Europe. A clear, federalist
vision which once seemed inevitable and
now sorely lacks a leader.
Today there is simply no one on the
scene capable of acting as the queen or
emperor of that project, as Merkel has
done for the past decade. That is due, in
no small part, to the decisions she took
and the hardness and hubris with which
she acted when she held the most power-
ful position in Europe. The Merkel pro-
ject had created a EU that had unachievable
ambitions, seeking to govern countries with
long histories of independence, and was fun-
damentally un-European in that it sought to
impose uniformity upon the most gloriously
diverse set of countries on earth.
It’s odd to think how recently it was that
Merkel and her vision of Europe seemed
unassailable. The first scent trails of her
political mortality came in 2016, when in
regional elections in Pomerania the three-
year-old Alternative für Deutschland (AfD)
beat her own party into a humiliating third
place. Then came last year’s German elec-
tions, in which the CDU suffered its worst
results since 1949. Merkel spent six humiliat-
ing months trying to persuade other parties
to go back into coalition with her — fighting
off repeated challenges from critics among
her own colleagues, most prominently the
interior minister Horst Seehofer.
It is easy to see why they have tried to
move against her. Merkel’s great selling
point — her rock-like immovability — had
become an obstacle, being seen as intran-
sigence in a Europe that badly needed to
change. Indeed, that immovability turned
out to be disastrous before both challenges
that Europe had to respond to during Mer-
kel’s reign: the financial crisis, and the wave
of demographic change.
The Europe that Merkel led pushed thecreation of a currency before it had created
a country. When the global financial crisis
hit the unsound structure that was the
euro, Merkel had two options. She might
have explained to her electorate that Ger-
many had benefited from the euro. That its
exports had soared because of it (with a cur-
rency which the IMF reckoned to be artifi-
cially devalued by around 30 per cent). She
might have explained that now was the time
for the eurozone to turn into a full transfer
union, moving money from the richer unions
to the poorer ones.
Or she might have accepted that the
eurozone covered economies that were sim-
ply too different — that German and Greek