COVER STORY
The great survivor’s
last stand
Germany’s Angela Merkel – the lonely chancellor – is under siege at home
and abroad. How much longer can she keep her tormentors at bay?
By Jeremy Cliffe
T
he Berlin Wall opened on a
Thursday in November 1989, and
Thursday night was Angela Mer-
kel’s sauna night. So the 35-year-
old quantum chemist went to her
bathhouse as usual. She left at around 9pm
to find crowds thronging the streets of East
Berlin. Joining them, she entered the West
at the Bornholmer Straße crossing and end-
ed up at a house party near the Kurfürstend-
amm, where she called her aunt in Hamburg
to share the news. She returned home early.
After all, she had work in the morning.
Such was the modest overture to one
the most remarkable careers in postwar
European politics. Without the events of
9 November 1989, Merkel would probably
have served out the rest of her career in an
obscure lab in East Berlin and might now
be travelling in California, as she hoped to
do on her retirement (when certain travel
restrictions on well-behaved East Germans
22 | NEW STATESMAN | 29 JUNE – 5 JULY 2018
2018+26 022 Jeremy Cliffe on Germany.indd 22
were lifted). Instead she was propelled into
the political vortex of the reunified Germa-
ny, where she rose through Helmut Kohl’s
centre-right Christian Democrat Union
(CDU), becoming its leader in 2000 and
chancellor in 2005.
Twelve-and-a-half years on, her record
is one of paradoxes. Merkel has governed
Europe’s largest economy with intense re-
straint: postponing decisions in a process
now known as “merkeln” (waiting until the
last minute to make a choice), calculating
and recalculating risks and acting seemingly
without ideology. Yet her tenure has been
marked by occasional moments of great
decisiveness: ruling that Greece should re-
main in the euro, switching off Germany’s
nuclear power stations, or letting in some
1.2 million Middle Eastern and African im-
migrants during the refugee crisis of 2015.
Merkel is a history nerd. She devours
books on 19th century globalisation and the
20th century’s descent into barbarity. Por-
traits of Konrad Adenauer and Catherine
the Great grace her office in the chancellery
while Peter Altmaier, her closest cabinet ally
and long-time chief of staff, has as many as
600 books on Bismarck alone. The chancel-
lery in Berlin is like an insurance firm with
an in-house history faculty: an overriding
caution mingles with a feeling for dialectical
turning points and macro-narratives.
It is in that curious atmosphere that the
final chapters of the Merkel saga are now
playing out. Battles over immigration poli-
cy are threatening to consume her chancel-
lorship in what she sees as part of a wider
struggle to preserve the post-1989 interna-
tional order. A career created by the fall of
one border is now being tested, perhaps to
breaking point, by the quest to prevent new
borders from rising.
Angela Merkel’s response to the refu-
gee crisis of 2015 was at first typical: she
26/06/2018 18:49:13
 prevaricated as thousands fleeing conflicts
in Syria and Iraq, and others simply seeking
better lives in Europe, proceeded through
the Balkans. When on 4 September a con-
tingent set out westwards from Budapest
by foot, she was forced to make a decision.
A
fter a flurry of late-night phone
calls the order went out from
Berlin and Vienna: the German
border would stay open. Trains
were provided while volunteers
scrambled to help the arriving refugees and
“welcome culture” was born. Merkel would
later defend the decision to Viktor Orbán,
the right-wing Hungarian prime minister:
XINHUA NEWS AGENCY/REX
“I’ve lived behind a wall once in my life and
have no desire to do so again.”
Since the peak of that crisis, the num-
ber of asylum seekers arriving in Germany
monthly has fallen from some 200,000
at its peak to below 10,000 in May. The
2018+26 022 Jeremy Cliffe on Germany.indd 23
EU’s Dublin regime, whereby immigrants
must register and stay in their country of
arrival, remains dysfunctional, but the
number who slip into booming Germany
from states such as Italy is still manageable:
17,000 this year to date.
Contrary to recent tweets by Donald
Trump, crime fell to a 25-year-low in March.
The burden can be borne and will ultimately
strengthen Germany’s ageing society.
Politically the picture is muddier. The
British tabloid characterisation of Mer-
kel’s Germany as a terror-plagued hellhole
is nonsense, but people are anxious. Par-
ticularly in the southern state of Bavaria,
the main entry point for those travelling
north, some voters bridle at the failings of
the Dublin system. Last summer’s election
campaign saw the chancellor confronted by
hecklers shouting “Merkel must go” not just
in far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD)
strongholds in the former East Germany but
even on the Marienplatz in genteel Munich.
On polling day the AfD entered the Bunde-
stag and pushed the CDU to its lowest result
since 1949. Of the states of the former West
Germany the AfD did best in Bavaria, where
it may deny the Christian Social Union – the
CDU’s more conservative and Bavaria-only
sister party – its majority in the state parlia-
ment in an election in October.
That is fuelling tensions between the CDU
and the CSU. The two sit in one group in the
Bundestag but have squabbled throughout
the refugee crisis. Panicking about a pos-
sible shellacking in October, the CSU has
escalated the conflict as part of a rightwards
lurch seemingly inspired by Donald Trump.
Markus Söder, the wolfish new Bavarian
premier, now requires all public buildings
in the state to display a Christian cross and
has proclaimed that “the age of ordered
multilateralism is over”. Horst Seehofer,
t
his predecessor, rival and now Germany’s
29 JUNE – 5 JULY 2018 | NEW STATESMAN | 23
26/06/2018 18:49:16

t
federal interior minister, has declared
Islam “not part of Germany” and devised a
new immigration “masterplan”.
W
hen she saw the plan ear-
lier this month, Merkel
bluntly told Seehofer to re-
move one of its 63 points:
a proposal to turn back at
German borders immigrants registered in
other EU states. The CSU insists that this is
essential, as such immigrants often cannot
be identified and repatriated (to, say, Italy)
within the time allowed by the Dublin reg-
ulations. The party’s intransigence became
fully clear to the chancellor only on 13 June,
when Seehofer refused to back down. The
next day Bundestag business was extraor-
dinarily suspended so the two parties could
hold emergency meetings. Both hardened
their positions: CDU MPs backed Merkel’s
request for two weeks to find a European
solution to Dublin’s failings and CSU MPs
supported Seehofer’s threat to impose the
new border controls unilaterally. On 18 June
the CSU agreed that Merkel could have her
two weeks, but no more.
The next showdown will be on 1 July,
when the chancellor will report back in Ber-
lin on her achievements at the European
Merkel may wish to be remembered if
not as the saviour of the multilateral
order, then at least as its doctor
Council summit of 28-29 June. These may
be paltry: Merkel might secure improved
policing of the EU’s external borders and
in the long-term “hotspots” for process-
ing asylum claims in North Africa and the
Balkans, but answers to the secondary mi-
gration (from a state of arrival to another)
that offends the Bavarians will be limited.
At best the chancellor can hope for the out-
line of bilateral deals with southern Euro-
pean states to trade German cash for Italian,
Greek and Bulgarian pledges to help reduce
secondary migration and take back second-
ary migrants promptly. Even this will be
hard: Matteo Salvini, Italy’s new hard-right
interior minister, said on 22 June that his
country “cannot take one more [migrant], on
the contrary, we want to hand over a few”.
So Seehofer, pressured by party col-
leagues, may have no choice but to turn back
secondary migrants. Then Merkel would
have two choices. One would be to fudge the
issue, signalling her own weakness and en-
couraging fresh Bavarian rebellions, perhaps
on the modest eurozone integration she
24 | NEW STATESMAN | 29 JUNE – 5 JULY 2018
2018+26 022 Jeremy Cliffe on Germany.indd 24
agreed with Emmanuel Macron on 19 June.
(Macron has been pushing for a unified eu-
rozone budget and separate finance minister
as part of his vision of European reform.)
Her other option would be to fire Seehofer,
propelling the CSU out of her CDU-Social
Democrat coalition and leaving it just short
of a majority. She would have to secure the
support of either the centre-left Greens or
the centre-right Free Democrats to continue
governing without new elections.
Would Merkel survive such turmoil? For
now she looks strong in her CDU, which
will have the final say.
Yet loyalists fret about the array of an-
tagonists that the chancellor now faces:
the CSU’s leaders are close to Jens Spahn,
the leading Merkel-sceptic in the CDU and
a prospective future chancellor. Beyond
Germany, the populist new Italian govern-
ment and central European populists such
as Orbán make it harder to forge a solution
that lessens the strain on Germany. Don-
ald Trump’s tariffs on German exports and
inspiration to Europe’s rabble-rousers in-
crease the pressure further.
Richard Grenell, the new American am-
bassador to Germany, sent eyebrows up-
wards in Berlin when he told Breitbart on
3 June: “There are a lot of conservatives
throughout Europe who have contacted me
to say they are feeling there is a resurgence
going on […] I absolutely want to empower
other conservatives throughout Europe.”
All of which helps to explain why the
chancellor is so reluctant to let the ornery
Bavarians have this win. She fears that a
German decision to turn back migrants
would prompt Austria to close its borders
with Italy and Slovenia, prompting a chain
of unilateral national decisions on immigra-
tion policy that bring Europe’s whole pass-
port-free Schengen zone crashing down.
Moreover, she sees this with her histo-
rian’s hat on, as part of a broader epochal
battle. For Merkel the question of whether
Germany, perhaps the success story par ex-
cellence of the post-1989 liberal order, can be
true to that order is a bellwether for a broader
question: can the global, multilateral, seem-
ingly post-borders settlement born on that
cold November night in 1989 survive?
T
he chancellor was long ambiva-
lent about running for a fourth
term, but is said to have been per-
suaded by the election of Donald
Trump in November 2016. Mer-
kel’s world – in which her rise and that of
her reunified, networked, integrated coun-
try was possible – was suddenly in peril
and leaderless. She has rightly treated the
idea that she can be a “new leader of the free
world” with scorn. But it seems she wants
to be remembered if not as the saviour of the
multilateral order, then at least as its doctor.
Merkel’s G20 presidency in Hamburg last
year focused on trade, the environment and
Africa and, in recent weeks, she has finally
confronted Germans with harsh truths
about the need to increase their Nato contri-
butions from 1.3 per cent of GDP to 1.5 per
cent in 2024 and 2 per cent by 2030. And
now she is determined to keep the Schengen
area from collapsing, or to go down trying.
There are plenty of reasons to scoff at
these efforts: Germany’s economic illit-
eracy in the euro crisis helped fracture a
crucial block in the multilateral order; its gi-
ant trade surplus of some 8 per cent of GDP,
the product of domestic under-investment,
destabilises the world economy; Germany
will not hit its 2020 climate targets thanks
to over-reliance on coal; and its moves to-
wards defence responsibility are too slow.
The West once had the luxury of holding
such things against Germany’s chancellor.
Yet today, amid a dearth of leaders, Mer-
kel’s instinctive multilateralism, her aware-
ness of history and her years of experience
are enough to make her a natural leader.
From Ukraine to the Maghreb, Europe’s
periphery is in chaos; the refugee drama is
unresolved. The global trading order is tee-
tering. The post-1989 world is giving way
to a darker, more uncertain age. Many may
be surprised to find that they miss Angela
DAVID PARKINS
Merkel when she is gone. l
Jeremy Cliffe is Berlin bureau chief at
the Economist
26/06/2018 18:49:17
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