did the Chancellor’s presumption become
clear — as did the consequences. Just as
Europe had in her view shared the burden
during the financial crisis, so should fellow
member states split the bill that Merkel had
run up alone in Berlin, in her one heady
moment of moral intoxication. But the rest
of Europe turned away. From Westminster
to Warsaw, nobody wanted to share the bur-
den for decisions that they knew their own
electorates would not forgive.
Overnight, Merkel turned from a force
of stability into a wild gambler with her
country’s future. And in election after elec-
tion, the rest of Europe began to pull away
from her. The Hungarians were at first the
most vocal. But Berlin, like Brussels, could
cope with the souring of relations with the
Visegrad countries, condescending to them
as trainee Europeans who had not quite
grasped how things are done. This narrative
was harder to sustain once Britain voted to
leave the EU. It became impossible once
Italy, a founding member state, started head-
ing in another direction. Five Star had been
boosted by the decade of outside-imposed
austerity, while the Lega was catapulted by
Italy’s first-hand experience of Merkel’s
invitation to the world to come to Europe.
We see this crisis playing out still, with
the EU recently rejecting Italy’s proposed
budget and sending the Italians back to do
their maths again — with threats of billions
of euros in fines if they don’t cooperate. But
the Italian government is not simply going
back to study and come back with the right
answer. And opposition to Merkel-ism pays
well at the Italian polls. Opinion surveys
show the Lega have almost doubled their
share of the vote since March. At some point
soon, they could head back to the polls and
come back with a result which will cause an
even greater nightmare for the north. The
Italians have had enough.
The same is true in Greece and Poland,
where things are turning ugly. Politicians
there are once again trying one of their
favourite extortion tricks — the Polish
President and MPs from Syriza in Greece
once again taking up the subject of second
world war reparations. Both are arguing
that Germany did not sufficiently compen-
sate their countries for the crimes of the
Nazi era. According to President Andrzej
Duda, a group of Polish experts is looking
into the issue, and has already concluded
that ‘ Warsaw was levelled to the ground’,
which ‘we were never compensated for’.
A cross-party report from Greece, mean-
while, says that Germany owes Greece
€299 billion for the occupation. One has to
admire the uncommon restraint the Greeks
Merkel’s great selling point, her
rock-like immovability, had become
an obst a cl e in a ch ang ing Europe have shown in not rounding up that bill.
Wherever you look — and whatever one
feels — the conclusion is the same: this is
not a Europe of ever-closer union. Instead,
the EU has become a source of instability
in the continent by its Merkel-like refusal,
or inability, to reform. As she begins to exit,
she leaves a country where the AfD is the
main party of opposition, where protests
in Chemnitz and elsewhere have seen out-
breaks of Nazi saluting, and where every-
body seems to be talking about the war.
Her throne will likely sit empty, because
there is only one politician in Europe who
seems to have any desire whatsoever to take
it. Emmanuel Macron is facing the usual
problem in France of a public that peren-
nially votes for revolution and then resists
all change. But the French President has
been preparing for this moment of conti-
nental leadership for years — composing
whole treatises on EU reform. His idea is
to further centralise the eurozone, with anEU finance minister and a joint eurozone
budget. For this, he needed German buy-in:
as he warned Germany earlier this year, ‘our
ambitions cannot be realised alone’.
Merkel was all set to back his eurozone
plan in return for his supporting an EU-wide
plan to manage migration. Which might all
have been fine. But now that Merkel has
announced her own exit, Macron has lost
the only real ally he had. Salvini will cer-
tainly not be helping him. And none of the
other countries, even if they wanted to, are
in a position to bring along their increasingly
reluctant fellow members.
Apart from Macron and the Commis-
sion, no one in Europe has taken the les-
son from the Merkel era that ‘more’ EU
and fewer nation states are the way to go.
Rather, the pendulum has swung the other
way. And unless the Commission develops a
sci-fi-like ability to become self-aware and
take over the world, it looks like the role of
leader of Europe will remain vacant.
There will be a future for the EU — just
not the one that seemed inevitable at the
height of Merkel’s power. For whatever the
view from Brussels and Berlin, during the
Merkel years, the rest of the continent suf-
fered the growing pains and decided one
country at a time that this wasn’t what they
wanted to be. The end of an era, certainly.
But not the end of the world.SPECTATOR.CO.UK/PODCAST
Douglas Murray and Sophie Pedder on
‘I’ve come as the living dead.’ Merkel’s last days.An Old Man and His Wife
He saw a butterfly, half-drowned,
and swam to rescue it; a palm
then spilled it on the pool’s surround:
a pretty fragment saved from harm.He knew that sun dries butterflies
but later, walking where it lay,
he found, with something like surprise,
it had already flown away.‘And if you’d found a wasp, half-dead,
that swam in frantic circles there,
would you have saved that too?’ she said.
And yes, he would, despite his fear.You cannot have the one and not
the rest: the hapless butterfly,
the dangerous wasp. Like love, the lot
comes undivided: smile, and sigh.— C.J. Driver