During Merkel's first term of office there were few foreign-policy crises. She took positions, set things in motion, mediated. In fact she unexpectedly found herself playing the role of a mediator in the Middle East, because she had built up a good relationship with the Olmert administration in Jerusalem and the Siniora government in Lebanon, without neglecting the Palestinian and Arab camps. There was another surprise when Merkel brought Europe and the G8 to a new agreement on climate policy. At Merkel's summit in Heiligendamm, President George W. Bush recognized for the first time that there was actually some kind of climatechange problem, and that halving emissions by 2050 ought to be “seriously considered”. That was progress.
Her first term of office would have been regarded as relatively unexciting, had it not been for the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers the year before the general election – a year when the global financial system, its surveillance and regulation, became the central theme of every discussion of foreign policy, and when fears of economic collapse took precedence over everything else. The crisis in the financial markets in September 2008 was the turning point for Merkel as an international politician. From then on, her main preoccupation would be the economy, the stability of the banks, the survival of the single currency and, with it, a whole range of political setbacks that went hand in hand with the euro crisis. Had it not been for the demise of Lehman Brothers, Europe would have been spared the worst of the sovereign-debt crisis. The dramatic rescue of autumn 2008 was thus only the prelude to the currency disaster that gripped Europe two years later, and which was to be the central motif of Merkel's chancellorship.
Two ministers from her party play highly important roles in Merkel's foreign policy: Thomas de Maizière and Wolfgang Schäuble. She met de Maizière – a cousin of Merkel's first political boss, Lothar de Maizière – when he was his cousin's personal private secretary while he was Regional Prime Minister in Dresden. Merkel was impressed by his organizational skills and ability to work in a team, and she soon decided to have de Maizière at her side as a minister. But how exactly do you run a chancellor's office, how do you hold a government together? Her predecessor Schröder had not left behind an instruction manual: all chancellors develop their own particular strategies and structures, in accordance with their needs. Merkel took a methodical approach. She rang the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, with whom she had a friendly, almost admiring relationship. Could the British lend a hand?
Blair offered to help, and de Maizière went to London to gain practical experience. For two weeks he accompanied Blair's chief of staff in the Cabinet Office in Downing Street, learning about the legislative process, the passing of laws, who was allowed to sign which documents, how to manage the secret services and the procedural rules. He took notes on who was included in which circle and had to be kept informed, who had access to the Prime Minister, how to run a head of government's schedule and how to find the right advisers. De Maizière's training paid off: he became an almost indispensable adviser himself, and remains one to this day – particularly in matters of foreign policy.
As mentioned before, the other person on whom she relies in terms of foreign policy, especially European policy, is Wolfgang Schäuble. He and Merkel have a special relationship. If there are two people in the cabinet who have similarly quick minds and penetrating intellects, they are the Chancellor and her Finance Minister. After many setbacks in his career, Schäuble has developed a self-confident composure that makes him unassailable. He has a natural authority that Merkel herself respects. In fact their relationship can best be described as “respectful”. Schäuble respects the fact that his former General Secretary is fulfilling her duties as chancellor in the way he dreamt of doing himself. And Merkel respects Schäuble's influence and independence.
There have been a few times during the euro crisis when they found themselves in disagreement – for instance, Merkel insisted that the IMF should participate in any rescue plans, and was more mistrustful of the European Commission. But when it came to strategy and assessing events, Schäuble was always her main sparring partner. When he spent weeks in hospital during the first year of the crisis, plagued by doubts over his political future, the strength of their relationship was evident: Schäuble wanted to retire, but Merkel kept refusing to accept his resignation. In the end, the Chancellor rang Schäuble's wife and asked her to tell her husband that he should take time to recover and stop offering to resign. Perhaps then he would listen to her – and he did.
Foreign politics are also within a coalition's remit, which is why Merkel would never have fooled herself into believing that she would have more problems in dealing with the world in coalition with the Free Democratic Party (FDP) than with the Social Democratic Party (SPD). This had a lot to do with the personalities of the respective Foreign Ministers in her successive governments, but it was also due to the series of policies with which each coalition was concerned. Merkel had a good working relationship, albeit not a warm one, with her first Foreign Minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier of the FDP. She felt closer to Franz Müntefering, her Vice-Chancellor and the chairman of her coalition partner, the SPD. Not only had Steinmeier always been too much of a Schröder supporter to show unreserved loyalty to the person who had defeated the former chancellor, but after a while, as Foreign Minister, he started to find fault with Merkel's foreign policy. He would calculatingly throw a spanner in the works without breaking the actual coalition agreement. In the same way he dissociated himself from her when a young Senator from Illinois wanted to stop off in Berlin on his way to the White House – right outside the Brandenburg gate. Steinmeier thought it was a wonderful idea – he regarded it as evidence of good international relations. He also knew that it was welcomed by a majority of the German population. But Merkel felt that she was being used by Obama: she did not believe it was right for a foreign politician to campaign for election in front of Germany's most important national symbol.
There was a more serious clash between Merkel and Steinmeier when the Chancellor received the Dalai Lama in September 2007 – an affront to the Chinese, who saw this as a show of support for Tibetan efforts to achieve independence. Steinmeier thought the gesture unnecessary and the recent history behind it embarrassing.
Their relationship became particularly difficult in the autumn of 2007, when Steinmeier took over as Vice-Chancellor from Franz Müntefering. Müntefering had decided to retire from politics to care for his terminally ill wife. It was clear to Steinmeier that he would have to position himself as a leading candidate for the next general election, and it was decided in September 2008 that he would be the one to challenge Merkel. How the two of them managed to work together more or less amicably for two years despite this rivalry is one of the Chancellor's most remarkable achievements.
The change of government in 2009 marked a genuine turning point for Merkel. No one expected such a difficult parliamentary term, in which events came almost as thick and fast as in the year of German reunification. No one expected the euro to face collapse – not only as a currency, but also as the glue that held Europe together. And no one would have thought that among the chaos one of the major areas of unrest would be German domestic policy: in particular the relationship between the coalition partners, the CDU/CSU and the FDP.
It is a commonly held opinion that years of crisis are good years for chancellors. It is undoubtedly true that Angela Merkel wouldn't have accumulated so much power, both for herself and her country, and would not have become the unchallenged leading figure in Europe if this multifaceted life-or-death crisis had not had so firm a hold on European and German politics. No politician wants to deal with crises. They take priority over everything else, dictating schedules and paralysing decision-making. The aim of politics is to change the speed of a crisis and force it to adapt to the political tempo. The crisis made Merkel strong.
During her second term in office, Merkel not only had to deal with the crisis, but also had to face a desperate struggle to control the coalition.
From October 2009, with the change of coalition, the atmosphere became poisonous, gradually infecting the entire political body. It shook the political body by stages. In Europe, one piece of bad news followed the other: poor budget figures in Greece, the country virtually unable to pay its debts; a financial state of emergency in Ireland and Portugal; warning signals followed by panic in Spain and then later in Italy. Governments fell, political leaders changed.
Which strategy would work to solve the crisis? The time when it was solely a European problem was long gone. By now the whole world had been sucked in. And everyone was threatening, begging, raging – and heading in one direction, to Willy-Brandt-Straße and the Chancellor's office. Angela Merkel sat on the seventh floor, taking on the burden of everyone's hopes and expectations – as well as all their problems. Yet, as her halo grew brighter and brighter thanks to a strong German economy, the world's crises refused to go away. Then, in December 2010, a Tunisian street vendor burnt himself to death in protest against state autocracy: the Arab uprisings had begun.
First it was Tunisia and Egypt, then in February 2011 it was the turn of Libya: a civil war that NATO helped bring to an end, but without the Germans. The UN Security Council voted for a no-fly zone, and thus for intervention by a military coalition under NATO leadership. Germany abstained, and kept its own counsel. Merkel declined to vote with the other nations, as had her Foreign Minister and coalition partner, Guido Westerwelle, while the opposition parties in Germany vociferously expressed their dismay and pleaded for an intervention on humanitarian grounds.
But there was yet another major international disaster in store that year. On 11th March the coast of Japan suffered an earthquake and a tsunami flooded the country, leading to a nuclear catastrophe. As a physicist, Merkel's faith in the safety of nuclear technology was shaken, and she ordered an immediate U-turn on German nuclear policy. At the same time she had to cope with the defeat of the ruling coalition parties in important provincial elections in Baden-Württemberg and other regions. In the Chancellery they were already using the past tense to describe a parliamentary term that left everyone speechless.
Merkel's annus horribilis was not only the result of catastrophic events abroad, but of the weakness of the coalition. For at the same time as the euro zone and the Arab world were in turmoil, so was a domestic political pipe dream: the coalition of the CDU and the FDP. Guido Westerwelle and his party had won 14.6% of the votes in the election to the Bundestag, and as a result entered into coalition talks with confidence. As a matter of course, as well as the job of Vice Chancellor, the party chairman claimed the position that had traditionally been held by the FDP in previous coalitions with the CDU – the Foreign Ministry. Several miscalculations lay behind that decision. It later became clear that such a partnership wouldn't work: for years, the CDU and the FDP had believed that they were made for each other. Since the end of the Kohl government it was common opinion that a moderate coalition was almost a political duty. No one expected the FDP to be so unused to governing.
But eleven years are a long time. And during the two decades of his leadership of the FDP Westerwelle had been unable to acquire any experience in government. Heading a ministry with several thousand civil servants is a great deal more complicated than running the FDP party headquarters. The CDU, on the other hand, had returned to power four years earlier, and the Grand Coalition had made a much stronger mark on it than was previously thought. Not only that, Merkel and Co. felt they now had a head start when it came to the issues at hand. At the Foreign Ministry, painful as it was, Guido Westerwelle had to accept that the force field of foreign policy was now centred largely on the Chancellor's office.
Yet the truth is that Merkel and Westerwelle have a relationship of trust. During the time in which they were both in opposition a professional bond grew up between them that is closer and more open than most such relationships in the political corridors of Berlin. Working together they had made Horst Köhler Federal President, thus exposing the weakness of the Red-Green coalition then in power. They both hoped to rule one day. But now that the day had come, one disaster followed another.
In the Chancellor's office, the verdict on the FDP and especially Westerwelle's first year was unanimous: he could have done so much more, should have concentrated on fewer issues, his emphasis should have been on other things. Instead he seemed to be constantly overworked in his party and ministerial positions, harassed and lacking any plan of action. Yet he and the Chancellor trust one another. Westerwelle always asks colleagues to leave the room when he rings Merkel. And to her he is an important source of information at the heart of the FDP. She trusts him more than Philipp Rösler, who has taken over from Westerwelle as Vice Chancellor and chairman of the FDP.
In the first year of the euro crisis, after months of criticism of his handling of his responsibilities as Foreign Minister and party chairman, two incidents were instrumental in bringing about the putsch against Westerwelle: defeat in the provincial elections in the spring of 2011 and Germany's stance on Libya. The German government had not voted for the no-fly zone over Libya in the UN Security Council – thus distancing itself from its NATO partners. As a result, Germany found itself in the same camp as Russia and China, who had also abstained, and who are always reluctant about any intervention.
Merkel and Westerwelle had jointly agreed on the decision. They believed that Germany should keep out of Libya. But they had not reckoned with the storm of indignation in the country as well as among the Western alliance. In public, Westerwelle felt continually obliged to justify the abstention, which only made matters worse.
For two years, the coalition's problems also did damage to Germany's foreign policy. This led to the need for an unusual alliance: the civil servants in both the Chancellery and the Foreign Office came together to settle their differences. Their traditional rivalry disappeared. After all, they all knew each other, in particular Merkel's foreign-policy adviser Christoph Heusgen and the Foreign Office's most powerful woman, Minister of State Emily Haber. The pair of them are on familiar terms, value each other's work and generally speak on the phone at least once a day. Furthermore, it is helpful that the office of the High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy in the European Union is run by a senior German civil servant: Helga Schmid, the Deputy General Secretary to Catherine Ashton. As Merkel's second term as Chancellor draws to an end, Heusgen, Haber and Schmid form the triad of German power at the most senior level of the civil service. It is rare that these representatives of the most important foreign-policy institutions are working together in such harmony.
Christoph Heusgen certainly deserves credit in this respect. Merkel's adviser on foreign affairs, he now has more experience than anyone else in government, and has been there from the start. Sometimes he describes himself as part of the furniture. Of course he is just teasing – besides, in his most famous picture Heusgen isn't standing like a piece of furniture but sitting down – crouching all alone at a conference table during a G8 summit at Camp David. Behind him stand the American and French Presidents, the British Prime Minister and the German Chancellor. Merkel looks strained, Cameron and Obama are jubilant, Hollande isn't sure what to do. And Heusgen? There is a look of sheer terror on his face. They are watching football, and Bayern Munich is just about to lose the legendary Champions League final against Chelsea on penalties. For Heusgen, a devoted Bayern Munich fan, it was probably the worst day of his career in the Chancellery.
Heusgen is the archetype of the sort of adviser with which the Chancellor likes to surround herself. Inconspicuous and unobtrusive, he cycles to the office. He does not have the big ego of his counterparts in Paris or Washington. He came to Merkel's attention when he was chief of staff to Javier Solana, the EU's High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy. Heusgen's greatest achievement from this period is a small pamphlet, the very first “EU Security Strategy”, which he drew up and for which he led the negotiations.
Soon after the 2005
election Merkel invited Heusgen to Berlin. They talked for several hours, and found that they shared opinions in many areas. Then Merkel asked him to work out a schedule for her first few days in office. Heusgen suggested visiting Paris, Brussels and Warsaw on the same day to show that foreign policy was her priority. The Warsaw visit turned out to be impossible for scheduling reasons, but otherwise the plan worked. Thus began his career in the Chancellor's office, where he plays an essential role. Apart from her personal private secretary Beate Baumann, no one else has worked with Merkel for so long.
Pacific Dreams
Yearning for the USA
Angela Merkel has two kinds of relationship with the United States of America: one very private, the other very public. The public, professional world of America is the side she sees as Chancellor: it is the America of video conferences with the President, summits, high-level politics. This America stands like a monolith in the Chancellor's political landscape: it is firmly marked on her ideological map. Values, convictions, strategies – from a political point of view everything revolves around the USA. But sometimes this America is a stranger to Angela Merkel. The longer her Chancellorship lasts, the more she questions it. As she sees it, in this America there is a dysfunctional domestic policy, an inscrutable leader in President Obama and growing doubt in the country's ability to question itself.
Angela Merkel Page 9