The medal that ex-Chancellor Angela Merkel really deserves does not exist: the Machiavelli Grand Cross with star, shoulder ribbon and laurel wreath. Her merits in the discipline of “political power” are unsurpassed and therefore deserve this unique award.
And that’s why: Merkel was the first woman to conquer what was then the men’s party, the CDU, and subdued it. As the first East German, she came first to the head of a western party and then to the leadership of a western state, which the eastern part had only “joined” in 1990 as a historical error. Merkel was the first head of government ever to leave office voluntarily, after 16 years.
Merkel invented “asymmetric mobilization”
Merkel managed to do this because she devised a new method of power. She left the basic lines of her own party without her party leaving her. They adopted the ideas of the Red and Green competition without the Social Democrats and Greens having found an antidote. Political scientists and pollsters gave their unique Machiavellianism a new name: asymmetric mobilization. That puts her in the history books, deservedly so. However, there will hardly be any further entries. Or if so, then negatives. Large parts of Merkel’s policy are now in ruins.
It is therefore only logical that Merkel is applauded by those whose policies she made. And criticism from those in whose name she made them. The applause comes from one of the two SPD chairmen, one of the two Green Party chairmen and, of course, from the Social Democratic head of state (presidents leave their party membership alone, but not their sentiments).
Ironically, her foreign minister honors Merkel
Frank Walter Steinmeier, former Foreign Minister under Merkel, is now honoring his ex-boss with the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit in a special design, in the presence of the Social Democratic Federal Chancellor and the former Social Democratic party leader Franz Müntefering, with whom she led her first grand coalition.
The boos come from the two bourgeois parties, in the case of the CDU, ironically, from the person who is supposed to devise a new program: Carsten Linnemann. The new CDU program is intended to overcome Merkel’s era by giving the faceless CDU a contour again, or more modestly: recognisability. The other bourgeois party with which Merkel spent four unhappy years, the FDP, notes that after her 16 years, Germany had become a case for repairs.
A judgment shared by the SPD and the Greens, despite all personal appreciation for the plagiarist from the CDU. In almost every Bundestag debate, Merkel’s years lost in climate protection play a key role – the traffic light parties are building on this as a “progressive coalition”. Now they honor the woman whose idleness they want to overcome. It is therefore only honest that no one from the Union leadership or from the top floor of the Liberals takes part in the awarding of the medal.
Merkel didn’t deserve the Grand Cross
Has Merkel now earned the Grand Cross? No certainly not. After the Nazi regime, Konrad Adenauer led Germany back into the circle of democracies. He gave this country its reason of state as a Western state. With reunification, Helmut Kohl brought back the East that had been stolen by the Soviets. Both Adenauer and Kohl have made Germany’s existence as a European country irreversible. There was no fundamental course set even remotely comparable during Merkel’s term in office.
Neither was Merkel the “Climate Chancellor” she would have liked to be. She was still the “refugee chancellor” that the Greens proclaimed her to be – a year after “We can do it” Merkel made a rigid refugee policy, also with the help of the pseudo-democrat Recep Tayyip Erdogan from Turkey.
The fact that Merkel saved Europe as “crisis chancellor” by holding the continent together is at best half the truth. With the gigantic Nord Stream project, Merkel divided Europe like no other German leader before her, not to mention the alienation from Germany’s most important ally, the USA, which even imposed sanctions on the Merkel government.
Schmidt and Schröder would have deserved the honor more
Now Merkel’s defenders, like her Chancellery Minister Peter Altmaier, are saying that Merkel’s policies must be assessed “from their time”. Can be, but doesn’t have to be. The achievements of Adenauer and Kohl have outlived their time, they have become a raison d’etat.
Two social-democratic chancellors have also rendered services to Germany with far-reaching decisions:
Helmut Schmidt with the NATO double-track decision, which heralded the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union and thus formed one of the most important prerequisites for the later German reunification.
And Gerhard Schröder with his groundbreaking economic reforms, which supplemented the traditional SPD policy of social watering can against large parts of his own party with the liberal principle of personal responsibility. “Challenging and promoting” – Schröder sowed, Merkel brought in the harvest.
Schmidt and Schröder, each in their own time, deserved such an honor more than Merkel does today. It is undoubtedly true that the majority of the population trusted Merkel for 16 years. But it is the almost logical consequence of the fact that Merkel, like no other chancellor before her, geared her politics to the opinion polls.
In 2011, 90 percent of the members of the Bundestag and well over 50 percent of the population were in favor of phasing out nuclear power. You could have known back then that it wasn’t sustainable. Merkel wanted to win the important state elections in Baden-Württemberg, which was the reason for the nuclear phase-out after Fukushima.
Merkel prefers to celebrate with her peers
The majority in parliament and the population were also in favor of taking in the Syrian refugees in 2015. Even then, one could have known that this was unsustainable. The rise of the AfD, which was a consequence of this, Merkel consciously accepted with open eyes. The CDU thus took away part of Merkel’s DNA – for 30 years the CDU had been the party against the abuse of the individual right to asylum. Merkel’s insistence on a “fair” distribution of refugees across the continent also damaged the reputation of the CDU as a reliable European party.
A reproach that is now leveled at Federal President Frank Walter Steinmeier, who was one of the architects of Merkel’s Russia policy at the time, is perhaps too cheap. Steinmeier has apologized for his naïve belief in Putin. not Merkel.
As Wolfgang Schäuble pointed out. The doyen of the Christian Democrats would have liked to have become Federal President at the time. Merkel prevented it. 16 years of government also left 16 years of wounds.
Some of the injuries Merkel caused go back even further. Friedrich Merz, whom she once sacrificed in 2002 for her own career, was not even invited by Merkel. She prefers to party with her own kind.
