Merkel's Mark
By Robert Gerald Livingston

Chancellor Angela Merkel's trip to Israel just before Easter, during which she was the first foreign head of government ever to speak to the Knesset (other foreigners have been heads of state), played to her strongest political suit: her skill and prestige in foreign affairs. It underscored vividly Germany's rank as Israel's strongest friend next to the United States. It will bolster her at home too, where she is doing well politically, the German punditocracy's usual criticism about lassitude in her Christian Democrats' (CDU) Grand Coalition with the Social Democrats (SPD) notwithstanding.

State elections in Hesse, Lower Saxony, and Hamburg brought dips in electoral popularity for the CDU, but it was still victorious in all three. This outcome strengthened Merkel's position within the party and affirmed the moderately leftward direction which she has taken it. Her only credible challenger for the party's leadership, the rightwinger Roland Koch in Hesse, was dealt a blow by the voters, as the CDU's victory there was just a squeaker. The blow to Koch means Merkel has one less heir apparent; no others of note are discernible at the moment.

What other factors explain Merkel's strong position? And strong it is indeed: she has been scoring approval ratings in the 70s for months now, the highest of any postwar chancellor ever.

It is tempting to answer simply: it's the economy, Dummkopf! Merkel has had the good fortune to preside over an economy that grew a respectable 2.7 percent last year. 2008 has started off well; investor confidence rose during the first two months. Additionally, Wall Street's meltdowns have not impacted the economy, at least not yet.

Germany's growth is, as usual, being fueled by exports. Exports continued to boom in 2007 (up over eight percent), despite the dramatic appreciation of the Euro. The trade surplus at $289 billion during the year was Germany's highest ever and the largest in the world, exceeding that of export-obsessed China. Most important at home, unemployment has dropped dramatically during her tenure, from 5 to 3.4 million, which she terms her "greatest success." Her government is on the way to a budgetary surplus, the first since unification in 1990. As a Financial Times editorialist put it: "Germany is arguably the biggest winner of the globalization stakes among the rich countries."

Her coalition partner, the SPD, is weak. Since the defeat two and a half years ago of Merkel's predecessor as chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, the Social Democratic leadership has been beset by instability. Its current boss, the bearded, corpulent Kurt Beck, seems unappealing to voters. His approval ratings have dropped to the low 20s. Compare those to the Merkel's. He has dragged his party down: the SPD's ratings too are in the low 20s, a depth not seen since the Federal Republic began. Rumors of a putsch against Beck by unhappy rightists in his party abound.

A major cause of their dissatisfaction has been Beck's hapless effort to adjust to a major change in the political landscape, the rise of the Left Party. Of course, the SPD has long suffered from an existential vulnerability: its inability to prevent parties from arising to its left, first the Greens in the 1970s and 1980s and now the Left Party, headed by Oscar Lafontaine, once himself a top SPD leader and Finance Minister in Schröder's government. The Left Party now scores 10 percent countrywide in opinion polls and over 20 percent in the East. It has made it into the Hesse, Lower Saxony, and Hamburg state legislatures and is governing in tandem with the SPD in the Berlin state administration. The Social Democrats are torn by dissension over whether to agree to accept Left Party support on the national level. This is still a no-no for most of the SPD's leadership.

The CDU, on the other hand, has always managed to hinder the rise of a party to its right. And Merkel now has new opportunities to exploit in this five-party (CDU, SPD, FDP, Greens, and Left) landscape. After the 2009 national elections, federal-level coalitions for the CDU might be possible with the SPD, as at present, with the FDP, if it regains its strength of the 1980s and 1990s, and conceivably even with the Greens. The Hamburg CDU is now thinking to ally with them in that city state.

Merkel began her chancellorship by profiling herself unexpectedly but brilliantly in foreign policy. She has traveled to more countries abroad than any chancellor before her. As president of the European Union she played the key role in salvaging the EU Treaty. Presiding over the G-8 Summit last year, she gently bullied through an agreement on global warming. She is Israel's staunchest advocate within Europe. She has stalwartly stood for human rights, chiding Russia's Putin on the issue and challenging China's leadership by receiving the Dalai Lama. She has repaired relations with the United States, which Schröder had badly damaged, earning an invitation to George Bush's Crawford, Texas, ranch. Her positions on Syria and Iran align with those of Bush's administration, but she has demonstrated her independence from Washington too by refusing to be drawn into the Iraq war or to send the 3,300 Bundeswehr soldiers now in relatively peaceful northern Afghanistan down to fight in the country's south, as the Pentagon would dearly like.

By championing policies to combat climate change and to promote human rights, she has brought Germany to stand for something more in the world than economic prowess and readiness to atone for the Nazis' crimes.

On the domestic side, as the critical pundits like to point out, her record is more mixed. But it is hardly insignificant. Her cabinet includes two outstanding ministers: Peer Steinbrück for finance, who has steered the government toward a balanced budget, and Ursula von der Leyen, who has radically changed family policy to provide more parental leave and nursery places to help working mothers. Merkel has had the courage to get her Grand Coalition to take fiscally necessary but politically unpopular steps, such as increasing the value added tax and raising the retirement age from 65 to 67, both of which help bolster revenues and preserve Germany's 120-year-old welfare state.

Rising politically after 1998, Merkel proved herself a canny operator. As has happened again with Koch last month, she has by good tactics, good instinct, or by sheer good luck managed to sideline all of her male rivals, the heads of the CDU state party organizations in the west. She does not make much of her gender, and she is no feminist battler for women's rights. But pending a possible Hillary Clinton presidency in the U.S., Angela Merkel currently counts as the most powerful female politician in the world.

The best explanation though for Merkel's success is to be found in her governing style. It meshes well with German political proclivities. Unlike the flamboyant and unpredictable Nicolas Sarkozy or the impatient and often dithering Gordon Brown, Merkel is down--to-earth, calm, predictable, self-confident, patient and, at the right moment, decisive. From her mentor Chancellor Helmut Kohl, in whose government she held ministerial posts in the 1990s, Merkel learned how to "sit things out" until the right moment arrives.

Trained as a natural scientist, she carefully calculates the pros and cons, the odds for and against any political move, and the likelihood of CDU-SPD consensus. That approach has served her well in maintaining the delicate balance of her Grand Coalition. She attempts only sensible, doable "small steps" in modernizing her party, introducing reform, and damping down confrontation. She does not practice populism.

This style suits the risk-adverse, security-minded, stability-loving German electorate, who abhor populism. Merkel has put her distinctive mark on Germany's politics during her first two and a half years.

That will become much harder within the Grand Coalition as the 2009 federal elections draw near, with the CDU and SPD both maneuvering for electoral advantage and Merkel positing reelection as her chief goal. If recession does not hit, her foreign policy achievements and courage, her modest but fiscally sound domestic reforms, and above all her integrative style, so congenial to post-World War II Germans, make it very likely that she will achieve her goal.

Robert Gerald Livingston is a senior visiting fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington, and was the founding director of AICGS.

This essay appeared in the March 21, 2008, AICGS Advisor.