So the two women who were to dominate the political landscape of the Federal Republic met. It turned out to be a unique symbiosis. Baumann soon became Merkel's personal adviser, and then, in 1995, her personal private secretary and office manager, a title she still bears today.
Baumann's role in the Chancellor's office defies any job description: she serves and commands in equal measure, and the two women lead parallel lives. “Such connections grow like hard wood,” wrote the journalist Christoph Schwennicke, “very slowly, one ring every year.” Baumann accompanied Merkel to the General Secretary's office, to party headquarters, moved with her to the parliamentary party offices, and finally to the Chancellor's office.
Except perhaps for her husband Joachim Sauer, no one knows Merkel better, no one else knows exactly where to find her or to keep track of her political activities so meticulously. Baumann is Merkel's most important adviser, and she has as elephantine a memory as her boss. According to Berlin rumours, the personal private secretary is the second most powerful person on the political scene – and feared accordingly.
If there is one thing that Baumann hates it is being the subject of scrutiny or commentary. It is her task to smooth the way for Merkel as much as possible, to see any dangers coming and stop them in their tracks. She is the ship's pilot in an ocean of appointments, questions, requests and demands – an ocean in which a host of dangerous mines are always drifting. She is, as Schwennicke has put it, “Merkel's mistrust.” Baumann enjoys what Merkel has given up only reluctantly: the cover of objectivity, anonymity. She has perfected the art of the personal private secretary by serving and assisting without reducing her own power. In the early years her influence on Merkel was viewed with suspicion, and some people claimed that it was she who pulled the strings.
It is true that she has constant access to the Chancellor, can speak to her frankly and express her own opinions. Because Merkel trusts her implicitly, colleagues find it increasingly difficult to get past Baumann and put their views to the Chancellor. Only Ulrich Wilhelm, Merkel's first government spokesman and her close colleague for four and a half years in the Chancellery, fulfilled a similar balancing function.
Born in 1963 and nine years younger than Merkel, Baumann studied German and English and, like Merkel, joined the CDU more by chance than by design. The arms race and the stationing of medium-range American missiles in Germany in the mid-1980s were ultimately the deciding factors in her pursuing a political career. She detested the ideological narrowness of the Greens and the Social Democrats, something that also affected Merkel in her own search for the right party in East Berlin. Baumann shares a passion for foreign policy with her boss. As personal private secretary she is rarely able to travel with Merkel, but sometimes she is at the helm of government when the Chancellor is away – for example in Canada or the Middle East – and when things are quiet in Berlin. She was with Merkel in Sochi when Putin let his dog off the leash, and in Israel when she made her historic speech to the Knesset. She and Merkel both enjoy analysing the characters of their foreign guests, and like the Chancellor she has a quick mind and is visibly impatient when a speaker gets lost in an argument that she has already understood.
Besides a fondness for everything from the English-speaking world, above all else Baumann shares Merkel's attachment to Israel and her attitude towards the subject of the Holocaust. It was perhaps not entirely by chance that Israel was the second foreign country that Merkel visited as the newly appointed Minister for Women and Youth. The first was France – she had seen enough in her dealings with Kohl to know that particular attention must be paid to political counterparts in Paris. Also on board the government jet were the Federal Minister for Research, Heinz Riesenhuber, and the Secretary of State for the Security Services, Lutz Stavenhagen, who nine months later admitted responsibility for a secret delivery of tanks made from components belonging to the National People's Army to the Israeli Secret Service, and was forced to resign.
In foreign-policy terms, however, the high point in Merkel's first year as a minister ought to have been her visit to the USA in September 1991 with Helmut Kohl – that is, if Kohl had had his way. The then Chancellor first went to California, then travelled on to Washington. With him was his Minister for Women and Youth, as a kind of trophy from the days of reunification. But Merkel would have preferred the role of observer. She wasn't allowed to operate independently, and did not want to stand out, although she did shake hands with her childhood idol, Ronald Reagan, and was introduced to George Bush Sr at the White House.
Later, Merkel described the scene in the bus when Helmut Kohl, as was his wont, wanted to introduce her to everyone who was travelling with them. The Federal Chancellor told his young minister that she should tell them what they had really thought of him in the East. Merkel was at a loss. Everyone thought that she would have to admit that the pear-shaped Kohl had been as much a figure of fun in the GDR as he was in West Germany. Yet there was another reason for Merkel's hesitation. She didn't want to curry favour, because what she remembered more than anything about Kohl was his brilliant after-dinner speech during Erich Honecker's visit to Bonn in 1987. In line with what had been agreed between the two parties, the verbal joust between Kohl and Honecker at the Redoute in Bonn had to be transmitted on GDR television as well as in the West, and Kohl's speech had made the citizens of East Germany feel hopeful, because he made several emphatic references to German unity.
In her early years as a minister, foreign policy was of secondary importance to Merkel. It wasn't part of her responsibilities at the Ministry for Women and Youth. Later, while at the Ministry of the Environment, issues in European politics and the EU council meetings of environmental ministers became more urgent for her. Whenever she could, Merkel would travel privately with her partner Joachim Sauer. She told Herlinde Koelbl that they enjoyed spending time in California. In the summer of 1993 she went on a “wonderful” trip to the West Coast. “A holiday far from home helps me to escape. In those four weeks I managed to switch off.” Four weeks in a row – a remarkable achievement for a cabinet minister, and evidence of Merkel's carefree attitude at the time. A year later she went to Provence, but she “felt like an unborn child”, because she didn't speak French. Next time it was California again, but at Christmas. “Nothing troubles me there,” she said.
In fact this period is notable for its mixed messages, as her long interview with Koelbl illustrates. Merkel struggled to come to terms with life as a politician at first, but less and less as time went on. “I still can't imagine that the rest of my life will be like it is now,” she groaned in 1993. She reflected on how the profession could have a negative effect on some aspects of her personality that she had suddenly discovered and didn't much like: impatience, an unwillingness to listen to others, an inability to immerse herself in a book. “I find myself looking forward to the time when all this stress will eventually come to an end,” she was still saying in 1997. “For me, quality of life means cooking meals at home and being able to fit in around other people's diaries.” Merkel continued to give voice to her thoughts as to when would be the right moment to leave politics, probably to reassure herself that she could still do something else with her life. “I don't want to be a half-dead wreck when I leave politics,” she said. “After a period of boredom I would rather find something else to do.”
Even now she still toys with the idea of leaving political life. She seems to have been particularly taken with the possibility – although more so in the past than today – of being able to do something completely different. At the end of the 1990s she told an interviewer that she could imagine going with Joachim to a research institute somewhere, maybe in South Africa. At another time she expressed a desire to learn French after the end of her political career, or to live in the USA for a while, or to simply stay at home and then re-emerge, “to see what's available”.
But these temptations never became too strong. Angela Merkel marched through the political landscape of the Ninet
ies at a tearing pace, in November 1994 moving from her interim position at the Ministry for Women and Youth to the Ministry for the Environment; with the CDU's return to opposition in November 1998 she became General Secretary of the party, and two years later, after the expenses scandal and the retirement of Wolfgang Schäuble, was appointed Party Chairman. At this point foreign policy was less of a priority than securing power, fighting the opposition and, above all, surviving the most difficult crisis in the history of the Christian Democratic Union.
Yet there is another event that stands out even more in those years, one of which Merkel still speaks with a glint in her eye, and which must have been a formative experience in her understanding of international diplomacy: the 1995 climate summit in Berlin. Environmental policy was a relative newcomer on the global political stage. Representatives of almost every nation had met for the first time in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 to discuss the problems of climate change. This was enormous progress: the human race had finally recognized that the climate of the planet affects everyone, but no one could agree as to whether the changes were for the worse, or what could be done about them. And it was the first time a binding treaty with climate change at its heart had been signed under international law.
When the Federal Government invited its Environment Minister Angela Merkel to Berlin a year after the Rio convention came into force, the question was quite simple: how to give meaning to the Rio treaty. The Berlin conference was the test: if Rio was to live on, then it had to be taken further. If the efforts to protect the climate were already faltering at this stage, then the whole international project would probably fail.
The Federal Government was hosting this great event. In Rio, Helmut Kohl had generously offered Germany as the venue for the next summit, and he now called for commitment from his ministers. After all, he told them, this was “the most important international conference that would be held on German soil for the foreseeable future”. The Foreign Minister and Vice-Chancellor Klaus Kinkel invited the delegations to a dinner – held beneath the dinosaur skeletons in the Natural History Museum in Berlin. Angela Merkel was chosen as chairman of the assembly, and presided over it in the large meeting hall of the International Conference Centre, beneath an enormous blue globe hovering in front of white waves.
Around 160 countries, as well as a similar number of non-governmental organizations, had accepted the invitation, and apart from the main conference there was an additional programme of related events and an environmental fair.
Merkel loved the atmosphere as, for the first time in her life, she was speaking in front of such a huge international audience: a thousand delegates, hundreds of other interested parties, a Babel of languages, a complex web of negotiations. “That's how I always imagined it,” she said later. “160 states. I really came alive. For the first time I had the opportunity to get to know the different cultures of the world and their various ways of working.”
As chairman, Merkel took on the role of broker: she had to mediate between the different factions. In the end she listened to the advice of her experienced Indian colleague, Kamal Nath. Nath had been his country's Environment Minister for several years, so he understood the complexities of the conference and took Merkel aside. Proceed with caution on the final evening, he advised; divide the delegations into developing countries and industrialized countries, and shut them up in two separate rooms. Merkel did as she was told: she divided the delegates, and went back and forth between the two, with the aim of preventing the whole event from collapsing, and at least drawing up a binding schedule as the basis for the next phase of climate-change policy.
At six in the morning, after a night of negotiations, there was a result: the Berlin Mandate. This was the name given to it by Tim Wirth, the American lead negotiator. The mandate stated that, by the time of the next-but-one conference, to be held in 1997 in Kyoto, the industrialized nations had to sign up to a binding timetable of CO2 reductions. The more stubborn countries among them, particularly the USA, had thus bought themselves time, but were duty-bound to go along with the proposals. Merkel had made herself popular with the developing countries, and even today her reputation in the Third World is sometimes based on the climate conference of 1995. The Berlin summit revealed an interesting side to Merkel, one that is still characteristic of her approach and which may even define it: she is extremely pragmatic when there is the chance of reaching a compromise. Dogmatism is foreign to her; she always wants a result. She won't brook unnecessarily binding arrangements. After the Berlin conference she said, “Of course one can go on insisting on one's maximum demands for years, refusing to compromise. I often decide to move things forward at least a step or two, even if I know I won't get unanimous applause for it […]. Perhaps a compromise only works when everyone involved ends up in a bad mood – then I just have to rejoice all by myself.” Merkel regards politics as a linear process: negotiations follow a kind of scale. If she is arguing with an opponent over a particular position, Merkel draws a line and looks for the central point between the two positions. Even if the decision is only slightly in her favour, she still considers the compromise as successful. But most of all she prefers a result that doesn't conflict with her moderating style.
Berlin 1995 provides a good example of this process of weighing up different arguments, and her preference for the role of moderator, but also illustrates her sometimes naive enthusiasm for politics at this early stage. Merkel became a little less callow every year. A new characteristic emerged, one that she hadn't previously acknowledged: the pleasure of competition, the excitement of victory. As a politician of the immediate post-reunification era, Merkel had always concentrated on the matter in hand, relishing fact-laden debates, whereas Merkel the minister found herself increasingly enjoying the thrill of political success. She was more at ease with public life. She admitted to a liking for the cut and thrust of political argument and seeing through the tactics used by opponents. When she was shown up in public several times by the First Minister of Lower Saxony, Gerhard Schröder, over the question of the permanent disposal of nuclear waste, she at first reacted with unchecked anger. Schröder had been playing games with her; she felt she had been dragged into the limelight only to be tricked. As Environment Minister she became more and more of an Aunt Sally for the opposition. Schröder described her as “not commanding, just pitiful”. And then, in her interview with Herlinde Koelbl, she made this feisty comment: “I told him that the time would come when I would get him in a corner too. I still need time for that, but the day will come. I'm looking forward to it.” Schröder would have done well to take the warning seriously.
Merkel began to revel in competition: kill or be killed. Be better than the others in order to deprive them of the advantage. A few months before the CDU was defeated in the 1998 general election and Schröder became Chancellor, Merkel showed that she was ready for the fray. “I've promised myself not to put up with things so much,” she said to Koelbl in an almost threatening tone. “And I'm enjoying it. It's rather like sinking a battleship – I feel great whenever I score a hit.” Later she would put it even more clearly. Asked about the pleasures that come with power, she replied, “In the past I would have said it consisted of shaping policy. Now I would say it's about snatching the prey away from your opponent.” And suddenly there she was, Merkel the huntress with a quite definite instinct, the ability to pick up the scent at exactly the right moment – and even, when things looked doubtful, a dash of courage.
In Germany, during the years spent serving one's political apprenticeship, the emphasis tends to be mainly on domestic issues. As a result, Merkel achieved very few foreign-policy milestones while she was coming to political maturity. As her party's General Secretary her first task was to attack – and since at the time the CDU was mostly fighting battles over itself and its past, involving party donations and illegal bank accounts, Merkel mounted the ultimate attack on Helmut Kohl himself by suggesting that the party might have to disassociate itself from
its father figure. Yet she had no desire to abandon Kohl's foreign policies – nor was she in a position to do so, at this stage or later. She felt no urge to reshape the party's political complexion: it appeared that Helmut Kohl had left the CDU's foreign policy in good order.
It was only from 2002, as Chairman of the CDU Parliamentary Party and Leader of the Opposition, that she made a decisive return to foreign policy. So it was surprising when Merkel revealed some of her personal policies on the political stage for the first time, providing an inkling of her appetite for European politics. And a politician's appetite is particularly voracious when it comes to appointing people to important positions. 2004 saw the search for a President of the European Commission, in a demonstration of power politics. Between 10th and 13th June 2004, the European Parliament was elected for the sixth time. The majority of the votes went to the European People's Party, made up of the various conservative parties in the EU. After that the Commission would have to be formed again, with a President to head it, who had to be approved by the Parliament and its conservative majority.
For the European Socialists, which included the German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, it was, in the light of the new balance of power in Parliament, almost impossible that one of their own candidates could win. But in the Liberal Premier of Belgium, Guy Verhofstadt, they found a candidate who was to their liking. As a candidate he had another great advantage: Verhofstadt was accepted by the conservative French President, Jacques Chirac, because the previous year he had arranged the “chocolate-box summit” – a meeting of the heads of government of France, Germany, Luxembourg and Belgium – with the aim of creating a European security alliance, an alternative to NATO, something which in the shadow of the Iraq War was seen as a retort to the USA.
Angela Merkel Page 5