Will Trump victory make Angela Merkel leader of the freeworld?
December 8, 2016 9.08pm EST
Author
- Johanna Schuster-Craig
Assistant Professor of German and Global Studies, Michigan State University
German Chancellor Angela Merkel speaks at a conference for her party.AP Photo/Martin Meissner
After the election of Donald Trump, commentators have argued that German Chancellor Angela Merkel may become theleaderof thefree world, a role typically played by the president of the United States.
After 11 years as chancellor and as the leader of the largest economy in Europe, Merkel is certainly one of the most experienced heads of state in office. On Nov. 20, after a long wait, Merkel finally announced that she would seeka fourth termin the federal elections next fall.
In the upcoming campaign, Merkel is in a difficult position. She must both live up to her reputation as a defender of liberal democracy, and also contain the right-wing populist streaks in theAlternative for Germanyparty in order to win reelection.
As an American scholar of German studies, I have blogged about how Merkel’spublic appearancesfunction aspolitical theater. The chancellor changes her message depending on her audience. At home, she is much more likely to appear conservative.
But in anticipation of Trump taking office in 2017, Merkel is publicly setting clear boundaries. Trump not only criticized heropen-doors refugee policy, but also may represent a threat to close international collaboration between Germany and the United States.
In between Trump and the German far right
Merkel is most likely to present herself as a defender of liberal values when appearing on the international stage. On Nov. 9, Merkel congratulated Trump on his new office at apress conference. In contrast to Russian President Vladimir Putin’scelebratory statementsor Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto’scautious well wishes, Merkel issueda warning: If Trump cannot respect “democracy, freedom, respect for the law and for human dignity independent of background, skin color, religion, gender, sexual orientation or political beliefs,” Merkelimpliedthat Germany will need to reevaluate the terms of its partnership with the United States.
This warning to Trump has been praised by some in theAmerican pressfor its defense of liberal, democratic values.
Protesters in Berlin tearing down a so-called ‘Trump’s wall of hate.AP Photo/Markus Schreiber
Many Germans see Trump’s racist and xenophobic comments as statements thatwould be illegalunder current German law. His rhetoric echoes not only the racism and anti-Semitism of the Holocaust, but also shares similarities with theauthoritarian doublespeakof East German communist politics.
However, in domestic appearances, Merkel is at times illiberal, choosing to accent her conservativism to pander to the xenophobic right wing. On Nov. 6, Merkel gave an acceptance speech after receiving the nomination of her party. The speech garnered widespread attention in the U.S., mostly for the moment when Merkel stated support forbanning burqas– a move designed to attract voters on the right.
Merkel’s campaign begins
As the German public was anxiously awaiting Merkel’s decision to run for office, German journalists Matthias Geis, Tina Hildebrandt and Bernd Ulrich published a full-page article in the German newspaperDie Zeitabout Merkel titled “Leader of the free world? Not that, too!”
In this article, they explain the difficulties facing Merkel’s reelection campaign. Merkel, they say, has never faced more pressure to lead. Europe isn’t pulling its weight. She doesn’t have unified support from her party. Finally, she doesn’t have the same polling numbers she used to. Despite these obstacles, they write:
“Merkel can sense that the arguments she could bring against her candidacy get weaker and weaker as the global situation becomes more and more dramatic.”
Merkel couches her decision to seek reelection in similar terms. When she announced her candidacy, Merkel said she needed to run because – after the U.S. election and in relationship to Russia – the world needed to be“sorted out.”Merkel repeated this phrase inher nomination speech:
“We are dealing with a world – especially after the American election – which first needs to be sorted out, especially with respect to things like NATO and the relationship to Russia. This poses the question: What is actually to be done?”
By standing for reelection, Merkel answered her own question. Merkel sees herself as the person to “sort out” the new world order. In this narrative, the first thing to do is support her campaign. The second thing, visible in her comments about refugees and burqa bans, is to pander to voters who might abandon her party to vote for the right-wing Alternative for Germany party.
The Alternative for Germany party, which criticizes Merkel’s every move, laterjokedon social media that the CDU (Merkel’s party) had stolen their campaign platform.
The Alternative for Germany party was founded in 2013 and is a xenophobic, nationalist, right-wing party critical of the European Union. The AfD has been successful in gaining representation inlocal German elections. They will likely enter thenational German parliamentin the fall of 2017.
Why Angela Merkel Isn’t Ready to Be the ‘Leader of the Free World’
Sean Gallup—Getty ImagesGerman Chancellor and Chairwoman of the German Christian Democrats Angela Merkel prepares to wave to applauding delegates after she gave her central speech at the 29th federal congress of the CDU in Essen, Germany, on Dec. 6, 2016.
Merkel needs to hang onto power before she can fight Trump
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German ChancellorAngela Merkelknows what it’s like to be underestimated. Her political party, the Christian Democratic Union, was a stodgy old boys’ club when she first joined in the early 1990s, and most of her rivals tended to dismiss or ignore her, thepastor’s daughterwith the chemistry degree — even as she passed them on her way to the top. What bothers her now, more than a decade into her tenure, is the opposite problem — theburden of being overestimated.
Merkel has President Barack Obama to thank for much of that. During his lastofficial visitto Europe in mid-November, about a week after Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential race, Obama spent hours preparing Merkel for the likely consequences of Trump’s victory. Intentionally or not, the outgoing U.S. President also gave the impression of “passing the baton” to the woman he called his closest foreign ally, leaving her to defend the liberal establishment that Trump and his cohorts in Europe had set out to dismantle. Many commentators evenbegan referringto Merkel as the new leader of the free world, a title that shedismissedas “grotesque” and “absurd.”
This was not false modesty. The problems that her government faces at home — from theintegrationof refugees to the rise of right-wing populism — do not leave the Chancellor with much strength to keep the West united. Merely staying in power beyond next year will be enough of a challenge for Merkel, and even some of her closest allies tell TIME that their government lacks the means and the mentality to lead. But whether she is prepared for it or not, this role may fall to Merkel by default.
The wave ofpopular revoltsagainst the establishment has been picking off her Western allies like ducks in a shooting gallery. Four of them have fallen in the past six month alone: French President François Hollande, with an approval rating in the single digits,announcedthis month that he would not seek re-election in the spring; British Prime Minister David Cameronresignedin June after the U.K. voted to leave the European Union; Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzipledgedto do the same after voters rejected his constitutional reforms this month; and, in the most astounding upset of the year, Trump’s victory has left Obama’s liberal legacy in tatters.
That leaves Merkel to pick up the pieces, but even her friends have serious doubts about her ability to lead the free world. “That’s stupid,” says Elmar Brok, the German chairman of the foreign affairs committee in the European Parliament, who has known Merkel since she was just starting out in politics in the 1990s. “Germany does not have the critical mass of power to play the role of leader.”
Nor is it clear that Merkel is strong enough, even within her own country, to uphold the liberal values that many people now expect her to defend. Her decision last summer to welcome hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Muslim world was, in many ways, a triumph of moral leadership over political expedience, and it was part of the reason TIME picked her asPerson of the Yearin 2015.
But that act of courage came at a devastating price. Conservatives within her ruling coalition went into revolt over her refugee policy. Many of her supporters fled to the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), whose platform claims that Islam is “not a part of Germany” and calls for a ban on minarets and burqas, the traditional veils that some Muslim women use to cover their faces. During a local election held in September, the AfD even defeated Merkel’s party in her own home district in the north of Germany.
That humiliation helped persuade her to claw back the ground she had lost to the radical right. During her speech on Dec. 6 at the national convention of the Christian Democratic Union, the party she has led for nearly 16 years, Merkel said that Muslim womenshould be prohibited, “whenever legally possible,” from fully veiling their faces in public. It was a stunning reversal for a leader whose name has become synonymous with her country’sWillkommenskultur, or “welcome culture,” toward Muslims and refugees, and whom some grateful Syrian asylum seekerscalled“Mother.”
But it was also, in many ways, a return to Merkel’s conservative roots. After the defeat of Nazism and the end of World War II, the entire right wing of German politics was occupied for decades by the Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union; its late figurehead, Franz-Josef Strauss, famously declared in 1986 that, “There must be no democratically legitimate party to right of the CSU.”
That status quo — and the narrowly centrist political spectrum of allowable German politics — held until the AfD was founded in 2013. Its populist message against immigration has since seen a surge in support across Germany. Even in Berlin, the nation’s diverse and cosmopolitan capital, the AfD won 14.2% of the vote during September’s election to the local legislature. Merkel’s party was not too far ahead with only 17.6%.
So the Chancellor’s tactical swing to the right last week was no surprise. Her base of support had demanded it, and her call to ban the burqa during the party convention got more applause than any other line in her 80-minute speech. Among the delegates who gathered in the industrial city of Essen for the convention, some felt a renewed affection for Merkel after that speech. “She said a lot of things the party wanted to hear, that we all wanted to hear,” Andreas Weber, a delegate from the working-class town of Helmstedt, told me after the speech. “With Obama leaving the stage,” he added, “of course she is the leader of the free world.”
Her party is still the most popular in the country by far, with 33% support in thelatest polls; 64% of respondents backed Merkel’s decision to run for another term as Chancellor. In a separate surveypublished last monthby the Koerber Foundation, a Berlin policy institute, 59% of Germans said they want their country to take an even more active leadership role in Europe. But Merkel’s allies do not seem keen to expand that role to other parts of the world. “This is not our mentality,” says Norbert Roettgen, chairman of the foreign affairs committee in the German Parliament. “This is beyond our ways,” he told me, “beyond what we can do.”
It was only in 2014, when Russia defied the West by redrawing the borders of Ukraine by force, that Berlin stepped up for the first time to lead the E.U. through a foreign policy crisis. But that was done in lockstep with Washington, and with ample encouragement from President Obama. Now that Trump is on his way to the White House with a promise to “get along” with Russia, the world will soon look a lot lonelier to Merkel than it did a year ago.
For most leaders, that would seem like a demoralizing prospect. But it may have helped inspire Merkel to run for another term in office — a decision she announced 11 days after Trump’s election victory. “If we still had a President in the U.S. who was caring for the liberal order, I could easily imagine her stepping aside,” says Sylke Tempel, the editor of theBerlin Policy Journal. “But now it would go totally against her sense of duty.” That doesn’t mean Merkel has the clout or the resources to lead the Western world, or even survive the next elections. It just means she feels the need to try.
These 5 Facts Explain Angela Merkel’s Tough 2016—and Tougher 2017
Angela Merkel and her center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU)were trouncedin regional elections this past weekend. It’s going to be thattype of year for Merkel. Here are the 5 biggest risks that Merkel, the mostimportant voice in any conversationabout Europe’s future, faces over the coming months.
1. Political Rivals: Continuing Rise of the AfD
Merkel’s CDU finished in third place in regional elections last weekend in the northeastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, her home state. Finishing behind the second-place far-right and anti-EU Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) makes matters much worse. Nationalist parties have been on the rise across the continent, a particularly unnerving development for Merkel, a defender of the broader European project. The AfD is a relative newcomer to German politics, but it has hit the ground running. Since its founding in 2013, it has gone from polling at below 3 percent nationally to more than 12 percent today. It has made strides over the past 12 months by taking a hard line against Merkel’s ‘open-door’ policy on Syrian refugees. AfD now has deputies in over half of Germany’s 16 state assemblies and is predicted to enter at least a couple more. It’s been 70 years since xenophobic and nationalist politics have found such a real audience in Germany.
2. Political Partners: A Fracturing Coalition?
The ultimate victor of this weekend’s elections, with roughly 30 percent of the vote, was the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), Merkel and the CDU’s on-and-off coalition partners since 2005. But the rise of AfD and other parties is putting a strain on the long-standing partnership of center-left and -right forces in German politics. Sigmar Gabriel—head of the SDP, Minister for Economic Affairs and Merkel’s vice chancellor—U-turned on Merkel’s migration policy and has declared the TTIP E.U.-U.S. trade deal “failed.” Even some of her reliable allies are distancing themselves from Merkel, a jarring development for a politician who just two years ago was touted as the savior of Europe. If the CDU continues to fall flat in regional elections, like the one upcoming in Lower Saxony, Gabriel and the SPD will have even more reason to keep their distance, making governing—and campaigning ahead of next fall’s federal elections—that much more difficult for Merkel.
3. Migrants & Turkey
It’s not hard to see why Merkel and her party have tumbled in popularity. Merkel decided to throw open the doors to Syrian refugees last year, a morally courageous and politically risky act. The German state has clamped down considerably on refugee flows into the country—for example, by tightening border controls and asylum rules—in response to domestic backlash. New asylum seekers fell from 90,000 in January to 16,335 in June, but the PR damage has been done, and a majority of Germans disapprove of her migrant policy. Merkel’s political fate is now inextricably linked to this problem.
To cope, Merkel and Europe have struck a deal with Turkey to keep refugees inside that country from attempting to reach Greece by boat. It’s done the job so far; Turkey currently houses 2.7 million displaced Syrians. But the deal is getting harder to maintain as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan grows more authoritarian and erratic; failed coup attempts can have that effect. As Erdogan tries to quash dissent, Europe is forced to decide how far it’s willing to work with Erdogan as his crackdown on independent journalism and assault on the rule of law continue. The increasingly vulnerable Merkel may be more willing than other European leaders to give Erdogan some space, yet another blow to European solidarity.