Angela’s demons

Bankruptcy, wrote Ernest Hemingway, happens in two ways — ‘gradually and then suddenly’. By now, Angela Merkel will be beginning to fear that her remarkable career is about to move into that second motion. Barely a year ago, she was being talked about as the leader of the free world. Now she is blamed by her own party for upending German politics and, in the process, allowing the far-right to become a real political force for the first time since the 1940s. The cover of Der Spiegel, Germany’s main weekly, last week summed it up in one word: ‘Crisis.’

It’s a crisis that’s been intensifying for some time. It began when the federal elections last September delivered the worst result for Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union since 1949 — a result so abysmal she was lucky not to be ousted. That may yet happen. There is growing ‘Merkel fatigue’ in the country and her centrist theology — Merkelism — is seen as a cause, not a remedy, for the current malaise. Her open-door migration policy has been blamed for pushing voters into the arms of Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), and transforming it from a reviled fringe group to a party with 92 members of parliament. Merkel’s latest move is to give AfD the status its members crave. By forming a coalition with her main opponent, the Social Democratic Party, she has made AfD into the main parliamentary opposition. Or, as the party itself would put it, the main alternative for Germany.

There was not much rejoicing in Berlin when Merkel announced her left-right coalition. ‘It’s the blind leading the blind,’ a Merkel supporter in the Bundestag told me the same morning that the Chancellor and Martin Schulz, the erstwhile SPD leader, unveiled their 177-page coalition agreement. The SPD leadership might be delighted with the plum jobs Merkel offered (finance, the foreign ministry) but its membership is worried that the coalition might be fatal.