Merkel could only compensate for this triple disadvantage by learning all the time, and very quickly. Her most effective weapons were to understand and be reasonable. Grand speeches would have eaten up her power reserves just as quickly as superfluous feelings, meaningful revenge, or an excess of personal loyalty. The German philosopher G. As soon as she climbed one step up and started to feel reasonably safe at that level, the next step happened, and again it was smart to maintain her energy-saving style and her considerate handling of people.
As soon as she, in her role as minister for women, understood domestic politics, she needed to prove herself as environment minister on the international stage. Just as soon as she could cope with that, this woman without a network of her own moved up into the leadership of her very network-oriented party. Shortly after that, she became federal chancellor, and then the crises started happening on ever higher steps: the eurocrisis, Ukraine, refugees, Trump.
It is a well-known fact that German philosophers are never entirely right. On the one side, she will be a lame duck because nobody believes that she will stand for a fifth time in On the other side—the positive side—Merkel by now understands the business of politics like few other politicians in Germany and the rest of the world.
This gives her an undreamt-of freedom. But what kind? It was a very American misunderstanding to call the German chancellor the new leader of the Western world. American leadership has never been like this.
Even under Hillary Clinton, it would have been very different. It is entirely possible that Merkel will now show this differentiation, this alternative behavior, even more clearly. Perhaps she will want to demonstrate to the world how one can assert themselves among authoritarian states and authoritarian types without starting to resemble them. France retained the top position as the most important foreign policy partner among Germans.
Most Europeans have said Germany has about the right amount of influence in the EU. With the exception of Greeks, most Europeans say Germany has about the right amount of decision-making power in the EU. Note: Here are the questions used for this analysis, along with responses. Fresh data delivered Saturday mornings.
It organizes the public into nine distinct groups, based on an analysis of their attitudes and values. Even in a polarized era, the survey reveals deep divisions in both partisan coalitions. Use this tool to compare the groups on some key topics and their demographics.
Pew Research Center now uses as the last birth year for Millennials in our work. President Michael Dimock explains why. About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions.
It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts. Newsletters Donate My Account. The most important bilateral challenge was definitely to hold the eurozone together, particularly after the sovereign debt and banking crisis broke. That was not an easy bilateral cooperation.
Both worked their way toward each other. And in the end, Germany did change its position on some of the key issues because of that intense dialogue with France and also because of the reality of the crisis evolving even further. She simply underestimated how strong the resistance would be on the quota system that was introduced for the refugees who arrived to get distributed across the EU member states. That was never accepted, although the decision was taken in the European Council with a majority vote.
But on the other hand, at the time of Brexit negotiations, Germany was one of the states that firmly stuck to the EU negotiation line, and that was crucial for the EU to really hold together. We would have broken European law if we had closed them. We would have also left the Austrians and the central Eastern Europeans and the Balkan countries with that problem, political economies that were much more vulnerable to stress than ours was.
We would have pushed off the problems in a way that we would have been justifiably accused of irresponsibility for. Frankly, what caught people by surprise in the negative was that the government then struggled for such a long time to get a grip on the situation.
Where all Western societies were engulfed by racial issues or gender issues, gay marriage, all of these things, she pushed her conservative party extremely to the center and changed the political landscape.
Second, and this is the much more important point, during her chancellorship, this country grew into a foreign policy role which postwar Germany never had and never dreamt of: being a foreign political actor, being the central balancing moderating power in Europe, leading the European Union. Holding it together was always France, Germany, and Britain doing that in concert. Now, with Britain dropping out of that equation, and France with President Emmanuel Macron being engulfed in huge domestic problems, this role of keeping Europe together and yet not dominating it falls to Germany.
The age-old trap this country fell into — it was always too small to rule Europe, but too big to be denied as the role of the main actor.
So you have to calibrate that role of leading without dominating extremely carefully. This is what she mastered very well. America always represented a hope, an ideal, and … the whole Trump era has been so hard to process because we have clung for such a long time to this notion of America as a model.
She is a typical German in the sense that she considers a close relationship with the U. She has tried to minimize the damage as much as possible and tried to educate her German compatriots, but also the European Union, that, on the one hand, one can no longer rely in the same way as in the past on the U.
Last year, this photo of a defiant Donald Trump facing Merkel and other leaders of the European Union at the G7 summit in Quebec went viral. It underscored what she holds most dear: her deep conviction of the value of freedom. From her perspective, Europeans are losing [a sense of] the value of freedom. She was undecided by the time he was elected in November She had to decide by December whether she would run again or not. There was a French election coming up that year with, at that point, an extremely unperceivable outcome.
There was the danger that France would be the next to jump off the ship. Brexit was just starting to become reality. We had Trump in the United States. It has never happened that a person got such a standing ovation. This is not done. And it was done. Because for the first time in the history of the conference, you had an America that consisted of two parts: one that challenges everything this conference had been standing for, and the other one that represented what had been the consensus of what originally was a NATO conference.
That is why there was this enormous relief. Here is somebody who represents what we think: she, as the German chancellor, and then [former Vice President Joseph] Biden as the American. What struck all of us who know her from other occasions, she was totally liberated. Probably these are things that might become clearer in retrospect: being the one who preserves rather than destroys, being the one who maintains, the one who solves crises rather than causes crises.
This is defensive, not offensive, and this is probably the biggest misunderstanding: that these gifts are actually valuable and not for nothing. But she was never able to explain it, and she will never be, so it will be up to historians to judge. Some of the German chancellors ended very sadly.
In , Merkel will step down from office, perhaps exiting the world stage. I think she would just consider herself a shrewd and calculating politician regardless of her gender, and that has been entirely borne out in the way that she ascended the ranks to party leadership. Despite that, we now have a would-be female successor to her in Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer.
Part of [that] is generational, and part is she is someone who believes in doing more than saying. I think she believes that if you have the competence, if you have the skill, if you have the wherewithal — whoever you are — you should be able to move ahead. The question is whether, under her leadership, Germany will move further with its positions on eurozone questions. With the current coalition, this is possible. And secondly, standing up for liberal international values and a strong Europe in a situation where trans-Atlantic relations are fragile at least, or challenged by the U.
The country would have been paralyzed by that debate. She would have been engulfed by domestic fights or party fights, so she decided to decide on her own terms how to leave and when. Public opinion swung around immediately, and many applauded her.
She slowly walks out now into the sunset. She is one of the leading spokesmen of Europe and of everything America stood for and what America created. Germany is the greatest success of American foreign policy.
Fantastic when you think about it and see it in historic terms. I think that leader is now Merkel. The career incentives for our students are so unbalanced — the salaries in the private sector and on Wall Street. We want Harvard students also to think about their obligations and the good they can do in the public sector. This is someone I can try to emulate. Very powerful. Skip to content The Harvard Gazette Angela Merkel, the scientist who became a world leader Unpacking the power of poverty.
Dolores Huerta receives Radcliffe Medal.
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