The
phrase that haunts Angela Merkel
A
year on and the German leader hasn’t recovered from ‘we can do
it.’
By JANOSCH DELCKER
8/19/16, 5:31 AM CET
BERLIN — “We can
do it” was Angela Merkel’s defiant response to the migration
crisis engulfing Europe. A year later, those words still resonate —
but not in the way she intended.
The German
chancellor didn’t just say “wir schaffen das” once; she
repeated it time and again, each time enraging her opponents and even
members of her own party.
“People are simply
tired of hearing ‘we can do it,’” said Karl-Georg Wellmann, a
member of the German parliament for Merkel’s Christian Democrats.
“The German government did a good job reacting to the refugee
crisis. But repeating ‘we can do it’ over and over again sends
out the wrong message.”
Merkel is a cautious
politician and didn’t rush her reaction to the crisis, when
hundreds of thousands of mostly Syrian refugees fled to Europe. The
Right predicted the end of civilization, but Merkel took the opposite
approach and temporarily opened up Germany’s doors.
It was a
well-intentioned response to a tragic situation but most analysts
agree that her decision to justify it for months on end by saying “we
can do it” turned into a communications nightmare for Merkel.
No group has
benefited more from Merkel’s use of language than the far-right
Alternative for Germany.
“The sentence is a
prime example of how language is more than just an embellishment to
politics,” said Elisabeth Wehling, a German cognitive scientist who
teaches at the University of California in Berkley. “Language is
politics.”
No group has
benefited more from Merkel’s use of language than the far-right
Alternative for Germany.
“We don’t want
to do this, at all,” AfD deputy head Alexander Gauland yelled at a
cheering crowd in Erfurt in October. His party’s support has
skyrocketed in the past year. In August 2015, pollsters had the AfD
on 3 percent support. In June 2016, it was at 14 percent.
Devil in the detail
On August 31, 2015,
Merkel was fresh from a visit to a refugee center near Dresden where
locals had given her a tough time. She was booed and vulgar slurs
were hurled in her direction. At the same time, the human cost of the
crisis was becoming clearer: A few days earlier, a truck had been
found along an Austrian highway with 71 dead refugees inside.
It was against this
background that, around 13 minutes into a press conference, Merkel
said: “I put it simply, Germany is a strong country … we have
managed so many things — we can do this.”
In German, “Wir
haben so vieles geschafft – wir schaffen das.”
German media picked
up on it, but it wasn’t until two weeks later that the phrase was
first thrown back in Merkel’s face.
“The sentence
essentially asks to be misused and misappropriated, because it
contains a completely unclear reference” — Joachim Scharloth,
applied linguistics professor
In mid-September,
Werner Faymann, then Austria’s chancellor and Merkel’s closest
European ally on migration, visited Berlin. During a joint press
conference, Merkel was asked about critics of her refugee policy.
“I say it again
and again: We can manage this, we can do it,” she said defiantly,
adding, “If we start having to apologize for showing a friendly
face in an emergency situation, then this is not my country.”
“We can do it”
went global, at least in part because of the soundbite’s similarity
to Barack Obama’s “Yes we can.”
But it’s not quite
as simple as that.
The German “Wir
schaffen das” does not express the same degree of enthusiasm as “we
can do it” does in English. Instead, it implies “we will manage
the situation, because we have no other choice.”
Merkel’s complete
sentence, in its original context, would more accurately translate
as, “We have managed so many things — we will also manage this
situation.”
“The sentence
essentially asks to be misused and misappropriated, because it
contains a completely unclear reference,” said Joachim Scharloth, a
professor of applied linguistics at Dresden University of Technology.
“When she says ‘we can do it’ — what does she mean when she
says ‘it’?
“First of all, the
sentence in itself does not say a lot,” said Scharloth. “And,
more importantly, she felt the need to [use] the sentence again and
again. This is not a sign of good communication.”
Cognitive scientists
talk of “negative framing.” In layman’s terms, that’s
invalidating your opponent’s argument by exaggerating it to such a
degree that it sounds implausible. One of the basic rules of
political communication is to prevent this; a good communications
strategy tries to make a point while at the same time stopping
opponents from seizing on it for their own ends.
On those terms, “we
can do it” was a resounding failure.
“Merkel’s
sentence was supposed to evoke values of unity and empathy,” said
Wehling, who has written a book called “Political Framing.”
“However, Merkel
put this statement out completely isolated, without any
counterbalance. This allowed her opponents to pick it up, caricature
it, and to rebrand it as a denial of reality, along the lines of, ‘We
can do anything — everyone is free to come here.’”
But Merkel has stood
firm even as the national mood soured following the New Year’s Eve
mass sexual assaults in Cologne and the violent attacks that took
place this summer, three out of four of which were carried out by
migrants.
In her annual summer
press conference in late July, she said, “I stand by the political
decisions we’ve made,” adding: “I didn’t say it would be
easy.”
Opinion polls say
two out of three Germans don’t believe their country can “do it.”
“I said back then,
and I’ll say it again, Germany is a strong country. I called it a
task for the whole nation. But just as we’ve managed so much
already, we’ll manage this.”
Germans aren’t so
sure, with opinion polls saying two out of three don’t believe that
Germany can “do it” and one communications adviser called the
sentence “politically poisonous.”
No respite
With two regional
elections coming in September — in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and
Berlin — the chorus of criticism is getting louder.
“Many of our
voters understand it as if we could, indefinitely, continue to take
in more people,” said the CDU’s Wellmann. “Chancellor Merkel
might not even mean to say that, but this is how it’s being
perceived — and that’s why people I meet in my constituency tell
me that they are just sick of hearing that sentence.”
In mid-August,
German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière, Merkel’s former chief
of staff and one of her most loyal companions, tried to defend her.
“No one said we
could do this with no sweat,” de Maizière told the Sunday edition
of Tagesspiegel newspaper, “Neither did the chancellor.”
His interview went
largely unnoticed. Instead, the headlines went to Sigmar Gabriel,
leader of the Social Democrats, the junior partner in the coalition,
who on the same weekend told Funke Media Group: “‘We can do it’
… has been a great mistake.”
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