If
Angela Merkel is ousted, Europe will unravel
Philip
Stephens
She
has been the rock of certainty. Without her the fractures would
multiply
It is more accurate
to call it panic than plotting. This week I spent time in the company
of members of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrat party. Startlingly
for an outsider, the conversations turned on whether the German
chancellor would survive the refugee crisis. Some thought she had
just weeks to turn things around. Never mind that only yesterday she
had towered above any other European leader. Overnight, the
unthinkable has become the plausible — for some in her party, the
probable.
Other voices say the
fever will subside, but Ms Merkel’s vulnerability speaks to the
convulsions across Europe caused by the tide of refugees from Syria,
Iraq, Afghanistan and the Maghreb and Sahel countries of Africa. In
the eastern, post-communist part of the continent, the influx has
strengthened the hands of the ethnic nationalists who never quite
signed up to the idea of liberal democracy. To the west it has
bolstered the fortunes of nativists such as Marine Le Pen’s
National Front in France. Rallies of the far-right Pegida party in
Germany now feature speakers who lament the loss of concentration
camps. If Britain’s David Cameron loses his referendum to keep
Britain in the EU it will be because emotions over migration trump
economic self-interest.
Ms Merkel has rarely
been called a conviction politician. Her longevity in office has
resided in her skill in finding the natural point of balance in the
German national mood; and, it should be said, her ruthlessness in
despatching potential rivals. The adjectives most often applied to
her leadership style, sometimes with more than a note of frustration,
have been cautious, deliberative and consensual.
“Mutti” (mum)
Merkel, as she is often called, has succeeded by assuring her
compatriots that she will shelter Germany from the fires raging
beyond its borders. They need not worry about the detail of policy.
Germans can be sure she will be firm but calm in standing up to
Russia’s Vladimir Putin and, though committed to the future of the
euro, will be a careful guardian of the nation’s finances. For a
decade, Germans have taken her on trust.
She has displayed
the same skills in Europe. Those who have watched her operate at
summits of EU leaders have marvelled at her informal
consensus-building. A conversation over the shoulder with this prime
minister, a deal sealed over a snatched cup of coffee with that
president, a friendly pat on the shoulder for officials seeking
common ground. Ms Merkel has always pressed the German interest, but
in a manner of compromise over confrontation.
The refugee crisis
has seen a different Ms Merkel: a leader ready to speak to, and act
on, her convictions, to step outside the padded cell of focus groups
and opinion polls. Her decision to welcome the hundreds of thousands
making their way through the Balkans made more sense than her
opponents allow. Could Germany really have built fences and posted
soldiers to guard them? Could it have chartered trains to send them
back to a Middle East in flames? But there was heart as well as head
in her response.
Fair enough, say my
CDU friends. And, yes, her welcome for the refugees initially caught
the national mood. But the sheer numbers — Germany expects 1m-plus
arrivals this year — have changed the calculus. Towns and villages
have been overwhelmed by the influx. And, this the potentially fatal
wound for the chancellor, a sense has grown that she has lost that
all-important control.
Politicians never
stop looking at their poll ratings and the CDU’s have fallen
sharply. There is no obvious candidate to replace her, but step up
Wolfgang Schäuble, the finance minister, as a likely stopgap until a
candidate is chosen to fight the 2017 election. Mr Schäuble has been
curiously quiet of late.
Behind selfish
calculation lies a deeper fear. Centre parties across Europe have
surrendered ground to populists of left and right because their
electorates have feared they no longer offer security. Germany, the
nastiness of the small Pegida notwithstanding, had seen the centre
hold. But now, on an issue widely seen as one of cultural identity,
has Ms Merkel lost control?
The answer I think
is no, but when politicians fall to panic anything is possible. I
watched at close quarters the defenestration by her own party of
Margaret Thatcher, another powerful leader who seemed invincible
until the moment of her fall. She, too, had won three election
victories. Though deeply unpopular by 1990, until it happened it
seemed unthinkable that her colleagues could turn on her with such
ferocity.
The stakes, though,
are much higher with Ms Merkel. The financial crash, the euro crisis
and the collapse of the Schengen open borders arrangement has seen
Europe unravelling as centrist parties across the continent have
struggled to meet the challenge of the populists. Ms Merkel has been
the rock of certainty — the leader with the authority to keep the
show on the road. Without her the fractures would multiply.
Mr Schäuble, too,
is a pro-European, in some respects a more committed integrationist.
But Ms Merkel has been the guardian of a post-1989 settlement that
has rooted Germany in its Europeanness. Her removal would see it
shift into the camp of those consumed by narrower, more immediate
calculations of interest, giving up on the ideal of a European
Germany. And that would be the beginning of the end.
philip.stephens@ft.com
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