The choreography is slick. As police outriders rev their motorbikes and
supporters wave huge banners, Mick Jagger’s voice crackles from the
loudspeakers strung above the crowd outside Cologne’s gothic cathedral: “Oh
Angie, Oh Angie, when will those clouds all disappear? Angie, Angie, where
will it lead us from here?”
But the razzmatazz doesn’t sit easily on Angela Merkel’s shoulders. The
51-year-old former physicist — ungallantly described by those who knew her
in her school days as “a grey mouse” and “a wallflower” — looks unsure how
to respond. Glancing from side to side she sees everyone on the stage
looking at her and applauding. So she goes for it. She punches both fists in
the air. The Angie banners bob up and down in furious approval.
Merkel, the great hope of the conservative Christian Democratic Union to seize
power from the Social Democrats in the general election on September 18, is
at last showing a bit of showbiz spirit.
But the pastor’s daughter in the bulky pinstriped trouser suit seems to think
better of her brief triumphal gesture. She quickly brings her arms stiffly
to her sides and flashes a lopsided smile, her heavy jaw clenched. Then,
with a last awkward wave, she steps away from the podium, leaving Jagger’s
lyrics hanging in the air.
“With no loving in our souls and no money in our coats, you can’t say we’re
satisfied . . .”
The Rolling Stones’ ambiguous words, penned in 1973 when Merkel was an East
German student, are the theme tune for one of the most remarkable, if
uncharismatic, personalities ever to rock the staid “men’s club” of German
politics. The trajectory that has propelled her from a quiet academic life
in the communist former East to the brink of power as the first woman to run
Europe’s largest nation has been meteoric.
Comparisons with Margaret Thatcher are unavoidable, although Merkel dislikes
them. Both worked as scientists before entering politics and, like Thatcher
at the start of her reign, Merkel is not only challenging the male old guard
but is also bent on introducing economic reforms to shake her country out of
its lethargy.
Compared with Thatcher, who readily struck the populist poses recommended by
her media advisers, Merkel is hard to sell, however. She is a deadly serious
straight-talker who has put Germany’s malaise — record unemployment, rising
debt and sluggish growth — under her microscope.
The CDU’s attempt to soften the electorate’s impression of her as a scientific
cold fish is one of the few amusing spectacles in a grim political
landscape. The physical makeover has replaced her pudding-basin haircut with
soft layers and highlights, and her make-up is now professionally applied.
Merkel clearly sets little store by such tactics. “If all people have to worry
about is the way I look then their lives must be very fortunate,” she once
noted icily.
She refuses to play traditional political games, whether kissing babies for
the cameras, making strategic alliances with those she dislikes or telling
voters what they want to hear. She speaks her mind and appears to care
little what others think of her.
Much of the old West Germany seems ready for her. Her Achilles heel,
ironically, is in the east, where she grew up. To understand why, I
travelled back to Templin, 50 miles north of Berlin, where the young Angela
endured a complex, some say troubled, childhood.
HORST KASNER was a Lutheran pastor in Hamburg, the West German port, when his
first daughter, Angela Dorothea, was born there in 1954. That year he
decided to take his new family to the Russian-controlled East, where his
origins lay. His move would not only raise awkward questions many years
later but also gave his newborn daughter a cross to bear.
While church attendance was not banned in East Germany, churchgoers were
routinely discriminated against. The children of clergy stood little chance
of completing their school studies, let alone going on to university. From
an early age Merkel and her younger brother and sister had it drummed into
them by their domineering father that they always had to do better than
their peers.
Merkel seems to have taken this as the leitmotif for her life. At school she
was an outstanding student. Former classmates recall how she used to study
while waiting for the school bus each morning. A former classmate, Harald
Loeschke, says he can never remember her having a boyfriend. “Even then she
was a member of the CDU — the Club der Ungeküssten [Club of the Unkissed],”
he joked.
“I wouldn’t say she was a nerd,” says her former maths teacher Hans Ulrich
Beestow more diplomatically. “She always let other kids copy her homework.”
Her father’s advice paid off. She went on to higher education, even though her
ambition to become a teacher was thwarted by her family’s association with
the church. Despite her background she joined the communist Young Pioneers,
as most children did, and went on to become local secretary for the
communist Free German Youth organisation in her teens.
This has led to raised eyebrows. Some have also questioned why, at the time
tens of thousands of Germans were fleeing from the East when she was a baby,
Angela’s father had chosen to take his family there. There have been
suggestions he was uncomfortably close to the communist authorities.
Stasi secret police files contain no evidence of collusion, however. The
records show that both Merkel and her father were approached to become Stasi
informants and refused. Merkel was recorded as claiming that she was an
“uncontrollable chatterbox” who wouldn’t be able to keep secrets.
Her file reveals that, like most East Germans who refused to collaborate, she
was herself spied on by supposed friends. One snitch was a colleague at
Berlin’s Academy of Sciences, where Merkel became a researcher after writing
her PhD dissertation on “The Calculations of Speed Constants of Elementary
Reactions in Simple Carbohydrates”.
This scientist passed on tittle-tattle about her private life to the
authorities. After her separation from her first husband in 1982, the
informant reported that she was seen off to work at the door of her
apartment by a series of different men wearing her dressing gown. Clearly
she was no longer a member of “club of the unkissed”.
Merkel, it was also noted, wore western-style jeans, which were frowned on by
communist bureaucrats, and listened to banned western pop music.
It was not until the communist regime was on the verge of collapse that Merkel
showed any interest in politics. First she joined the Democratic Awakening
movement then, after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, switched to the CDU.
Helmut Kohl, the all-powerful German chancellor, took her under his wing after
reunification.
At the time he was heralded as a saviour in the former communist state. But
when his promise of creating a “blooming landscape” in the east failed to
materialise, deep disillusionment set in, contributing to the defeat of the
CDU by Gerhard Schröder’s Social Democrat/Green coalition in 1998.
Even though Schröder has failed to turn the east’s fortunes around over the
past seven years, the CDU is still blamed by many there for their woes.
Kohl’s populist decision to give virtually valueless East German Ostmarks
parity with western Deutschmarks was politically shrewd in the short term,
because it protected East Germans’ savings, but it wrecked any chance
eastern industries had of being competitive.
Numerous factories closed. More than 3m East Germans moved west in search of
work. Many communities were devastated. Templin survived by transforming
itself into a spa resort.
In her hometown today, Merkel is no longer regarded as an Ossie, as former
East Germans are known, but a Wessie, or West German, for hitching her
fortune to the CDU.
“We don’t see her back here that often,” said Ulrich Schoeneich, the mayor of
Templin. “She’s not that popular in these parts. It might be good for the town
if she becomes chancellor. We could start up some ‘Angela Merkel lived here
tours’. But the truth is most people here don’t want to see her elected.
They don’t think she’ll do much for them.”
As a Social Democrat, Schoeneich may be less than objective, but others in the
town and the neighbouring village of Hoheswerde — where Merkel and her
second husband keep a weekend home — echo his sentiments.
There were hoots of derision in Hoheswerde after the mass-circulation Bild
newspaper published a piece on “Angela Merkel’s private world” in which she
talked about tending the asters, marigolds and kohlrabi in her village
garden.
“You rarely see her out in the garden. Her husband seems to do most of that
work as far as we can tell,” said one neighbour.
“Even though they’ve had this house for many years they keep to themselves.
Occasionally you see them out jogging. But I wouldn’t say they are that
popular here,” said another, his wife nodding agreement by his side. “I
won’t be voting for Merkel, that’s for sure.”
Her parents, who still live in Templin, have remained tight-lipped about her
political ambitions. Her mother became a local councillor for the Social
Democrats after reunification, and some see this as evidence of ideological
tension within the family.
Schoeneich dismissed this and said the family is close — though he then
related how Merkel failed to tell her parents she was getting married for a
second time. “As Frau Kasner tells it, her daughter was standing in the
kitchen the day after the wedding and simply turned around and said, ‘By the
way I got married yesterday’,” he confided, shaking his head.
If this is hardly the behaviour of a Margaret Thatcher then neither of her
husbands has been a Denis. The first, Ulrich Merkel, was a physicist she met
at university. He claims to be bemused that when she left him she kept both
their washing machine and his surname.
Her second husband, Joachim Sauer, is a world-renowned chemistry professor and
even less of a Denis Thatcher. His surname means “sour” or “angry” in German
and he has made it clear he has no interest in being a good-natured consort.
He repeatedly asks the press to leave him alone.
Some conservative voters are perturbed that the couple, married in 1998,
appear to lead separate lives. Merkel relaxes with a circle of politically
minded women friends in Berlin while Sauer gets on with his chemistry. Their
annual outing to the Bayreuth festival to listen to Wagner is one of the
rare occasions they are seen out together.
IT IS against this backdrop of voter suspicion that Merkel has suffered a
distinct narrowing of her lead in the election race. When the poll was
called she was immediately dubbed the chancellor-in-waiting. Tony Blair
snubbed Schröder to see Merkel first on a visit to Berlin. Now Schröder is
on the up — his SPD is at 28% in the latest polls with the CDU down to 41% —
and Merkel’s mettle is being tested.
()
Unlike Britain’s first-past-the-post system, designed to produce an outright
winner, Germany’s complicated electoral arithmetic tends towards coalitions.
Even if Merkel’s Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister party, the
Christian Social Union (CSU), garner more than 40% of the vote they will be
forced to rely on support from the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) to form a
majority.
Political parties are referred to by their colours in Germany: the SPD (red),
the FDP (yellow), the CDU/CSU (black) and the Greens (green, of course).
This turns the political landscape into a kaleidoscope of traffic light
analogies.
The ruling coalition is invariably referred to as “red-green”. But since the
emergence of a new left-wing alliance, the Left party, there is now another
“red” on the scene. Some commentators speculate that the SPD can cling onto
power with a red-red-green coalition.
The Left party was set up to discomfort Schröder. Made up of rebels from the
SPD and East Germany’s former Communist party, it is led by his
temperamental former finance minister Oskar Lafontaine. But it has turned
out to be a big headache for Merkel, too.
The alliance was formed only in mid-July, yet polls show it gaining 33%
support in the east, where disaffection with both the CDU/CSU and SPD is at
its greatest and voters are notoriously fickle.
Merkel’s hopes of wooing the east were damaged by a Christian Democrat state
minister who, in the light of a sensational child murder, seemed to suggest
that killing babies was typical eastern behaviour. And then her senior ally,
the CSU leader Edmund Stoiber, appeared to brand easterners as too stupid to
decide Germany’s future.
Some have accused Stoiber of deliberately trying to sabotage Merkel in a fit
of pique at her rapid rise. Certainly she has few reliable friends at the
top.
While Stoiber has spent his life building a political power base, Merkel
elbowed her way to the pinnacle of her party in record time.
She was first talent-spotted by Kohl after she was elected to parliament in
1990. Despite referring to her condescendingly as “das Mädchen” (the girl) —
supposedly because of her tendency to blush — he quickly made her minister
for youth and women and then for the environment.
When Kohl became embroiled in a party funding scandal, however, “the girl”
showed her steel by penning a withering newspaper condemnation of him. A new
political star was born.
It was a move that smacked of Margaret Thatcher’s 1975 leadership challenge to
Ted Heath, the man who first promoted her to the cabinet. Merkel’s chances
of winning power may well depend on whether Germany feels as much in need of
her brisk medicine as economically battered Britain did of Thatcher’s in
1979.
Merkel’s prescription for economic recovery has been dubbed a form of parental
“tough love”, centring on a shake-up of Germany’s stifling labour and
pension laws and a Vat increase to finance cuts in non-wage labour costs.
Sympathetic economists say that, like Thatcher’s initial reforms, this
restructuring would hurt at first and might even hold back growth in the
short term, but would improve Germany’s competitiveness in the longer term.
At first glance Germany’s economy looks deeply gloomy. Unemployment, although
starting to fall slowly, stands at almost 5m. This is an average of 11.6%
nationally but reaches 30% in the east.
The jobless level coupled with a rigid and expensive labour market, stagnant
growth and an ageing population (19% of Germans are 65 and over) has pushed
social security payments to levels exceeding worker contributions. As a
result Germany’s budget deficit has exceeded the European Union limit of 3%
for four years, and the accumulated public debt now amounts to 66% of gross
domestic product.
Schröder introduced his own economic reform programme, Agenda 2010, after his
re-election in 2002; but it has been a failure. The most radical measure —
the restructuring of unemployment benefits and social security — was hugely
costly. One of the effects of cutting unemployment benefits has been to make
workers more fearful of losing their jobs. This, in turn, has led to a slump
in consumer spending, which has further dragged the economy down.
On the other hand, pro-reform economists say it is not all bad news. The fear
of unemployment has strengthened the hand of employers brokering new wage
deals and weakened the power of the trade unions.
Some workers have been prepared to accept wage cuts, longer hours and more
flexible working practices. This has slowly led to a reduction in the cost
of German labour, long considered the most expensive in Europe. With
competitiveness improving, Germany last year regained its position as the
world’s biggest exporter.
The signs of improving economic health are probably too little, too late for
the ailing Schröder, however. While economists cautiously predict that
Germany could be heading for a new Wirtschaftswunder — economic miracle
— few in this country of 80m feel much optimism after being condemned as the
sick man of Europe for so long.
Merkel exploits this angst mercilessly as she tours the country seeking votes.
Again and again she tells her audience that Britain has outstripped Germany
in economic growth — as if this is an indignity too far. “We can do better
than this. Germany can be number one. But if we do nothing, things are going
to get worse and worse,” she says, raising both hands in the air in
supplication.
Apart from raising Vat — hardly a vote-winner — Merkel has been imprecise
about her reforms. But those she recently named as members of her shadow
cabinet were taken by many as an indication that she could be planning to be
radical. Her choice of the controversial Paul Kirchhof to take charge of
financial policy has been seized on by Schröder as a sign that she would
favour the rich if she came to power.
Kirchhof, a tax law professor and former judge, is an outspoken champion of a
flat rate of income tax, which he argues would boost consumer spending. Two
years ago he proposed a 25% flat tax on all forms of income for individuals
and businesses alike, coupled with the abolition of Germany’s myriad tax
exemptions.
Merkel has denied that she would introduce a flat tax if elected. But Kirchhof
continues to insist that a conservative government would support a
simplification of Germany’s complex tax code, “shortening the time it takes
to fill out an income tax form to 10 minutes from 12 Saturdays a year”.
Another hint of the possible way ahead lay in an attack on the trade unions
last week by Guido Westerwelle, leader of the Free Democrats and a potential
partner for Merkel in a coalition. He accused union officials of obstructing
economic reform and of “blocking the the reduction in mass unemployment” by
clinging to rigid labour market rules. “I won’t be looking for conflict, but
I won’t avoid it if it’s necessary to create a new beginning for Germany,”
he said.
Merkel has not been so outspoken. But pollsters say that the key to her
success lies less with how the electorate react to her vague policy
proposals than with their faith in her personally.
Many complain that compared with Schröder, a supreme media charmer, she is
“too technocratic” and doesn’t “tell stories” that the electorate can
identify with.
How she performs in a 90-minute televised debate with the chancellor next
Sunday could be critical. Some polls predict almost half the country’s
voters will make up their minds in the final two weeks before the election.
But even if Merkel fails to sparkle, this could be to her advantage. Many
voters have grown weary of Schröder’s slickness, superficiality and broken
promises.
Merkel frequently stumbles, lisps slightly and often wags her finger like a
stern headmistress — traits that have made her the butt of late-night talk
show jokes and satirical send-ups. She also tends to talk in a way that many
west Germans perceive as old-fashioned, even “Prussian”, speaking of her
desire “to serve” her country and stressing the need for “hard work” and
“humility”.
But with Germany mired in such a psychological malaise, these are values her
countrymen know they need to nurture if they are to turn the corner.
There are two potential epitaphs to this extraordinary woman’s political
career. Will it be Mick Jagger singing: “Angie, Angie, you can’t say we
never tried. Angie, you’re beautiful, but ain’t it time we said goodbye?”
Or will it be the words of St Francis of Assisi painted on a wall in her home
town of Templin?
“If you do first what is necessary, then what is possible, suddenly you will
find you are achieving the impossible.”
Margaret Thatcher might have said that.
MERKEL’S METEORIC RISE
1954 Born in West Germany; family moves to the East
1977 While studying physics, marries Ulrich Merkel
1978 Researcher, East Berlin academy
1982 Marriage ends
1989 Fall of Berlin Wall
1990 Joins CDU, elected to parliament after reunification
1991 Minister for youth and women
1994 Environment minister
1998 Marries Joachim Sauer
2000 CDU chairwoman
2002 Opposition leader in parliament
