Doubted at home, bypassed abroad: is Merkel’s reign nearing
a frustrated end?
As the row in her coalition deepens over migration, a once
dominant figure is starting to look forlorn
Simon Tisdall
Sun 17 Jun 2018 06.00 BST
For nearly 14 years as Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel
has defined and personified Europe’s middle ground: pragmatic, consensual,
mercantilist, petit-bourgeois, above all stable. It is little wonder the leader
of Mitteleuropa’s major economic power has dominated the political centre for
so long.
But what if Merkel falls? Can the centre hold? These are
increasingly urgent questions as the once unassailable “Mutti” struggles to
hold together a fractious coalition. The immediate issue, which is likely to come
to a head on Monday, is a furious row over EU immigration policy. But other
problems are piling up, with unpredictable consequences for Europe’s future
cohesion.
Merkel’s political obituary has been written many times, but
now the final draft is nearing completion. She is under fire from the
hard-right, anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which stormed
into the Bundestag last autumn. She has problems with the failing, unpopular
Social Democrats on her left, on whom she depends for support.
More seriously, though, Merkel is being challenged from
within by her interior minister, Horst Seehofer, former chairman of Bavaria’s
rightwing CSU, which is allied to Merkel’s Christian Democrats. In sum,
Seehofer is demanding Germany no longer admit migrants who have first entered
the EU via other member states – which is nearly all of them. In Merkel’s view,
such a bar would be illegal and would wreck her efforts – ongoing since the
2015 Syrian refugee crisis, when Germany accepted 1 million migrants – to
create a balanced, EU-wide policy of voluntary migrant quotas. She says
Seehofer should wait for this month’s EU summit to come up with a joint plan.
The problem with that approach is twofold. Seehofer’s CSU,
which faces a critical electoral clash with the AfD in October, complains that
the EU has been trying and failing to agree this for years. Another objection,
as her critics see it, is that most Germans, recalling her 2015 “open door”
policy, do not trust Merkel on this issue. Polls indicate 65% back tighter
border controls.
Last week’s row between France and Italy, sparked by Rome’s
decision to refuse entry to a ship, the Aquarius, carrying 629 migrants rescued
off Libya, showed how improbable is the prospect of agreement at the Brussels
summit. Italy’s new populist leadership, in common with an emerging axis of
nationalist-minded governments in Austria, Hungary and Poland, believes it has
a mandate to halt the migrant flow. Meanwhile, so-called “frontline states”
such as Greece, Spain and Italy accuse “destination states” such as Germany,
France and the UK of failing to accept a fair share of migrants.
Trump appears to be
conducting a vendetta with Germany. Is there a misogynist tinge to his
behaviour? Probably.
Divisions have been exacerbated by the failure, so far, of a
key Merkel-backed initiative, the multibillion-euro EU Emergency Trust Fund for
Africa, to reduce migration by addressing “root causes” in places such as
Nigeria, Eritrea and Somalia. Reported scandals over the mistreatment of
migrants, and inflammatory publicity given to crimes carried out by asylum
seekers, stoke the tensions.
Merkel’s difficulties extend beyond one rebellious senior
minister. In the view of many analysts, she has not re-established her domestic
authority since the CDU lost seats in last September’s federal elections and
she scrabbled for months to form a coalition. On international issues, Merkel
also appears jaded and discouraged, according to close observers.
Der Spiegel paints a picture of a leader whose cherished
worldview of a rules-based international order has been severely shaken by the
apparent impunity enjoyed by authoritarian regimes such as Vladimir Putin’s
Russia and Xi Jinping’s China. The advent of Donald Trump, the “disrupter-in-chief”,
and his America First ideology has proved even more damaging than Merkel
feared, Der Spiegel said.
“If Hillary Clinton had won the US election, Merkel would
not have run again [in 2017],” it reported, citing a close confidant. “But that
didn’t happen. In his new book about his years in the West Wing, former Barack
Obama adviser Ben Rhodes writes that Merkel felt obligated to defend the free
world order in the wake of Trump’s victory.”
Maybe that struggle is proving too burdensome. The immediate
post-Obama days, when Merkel was hailed as western democracy’s lone saviour,
are long gone, too. Trump appears to be conducting a vendetta with Germany over
what he sees as unfair export practices and unequal defence spending. Is there
a competitive, misogynist tinge to his behaviour? Probably.
In any event, Berlin has more to lose than most if promised
retaliatory EU tariffs, which Merkel failed to water down, provoke a full-blown
trade war with Washington. Meanwhile, Trump’s loud-mouthed ambassador to Germany,
Richard Grenell, openly conspires with her conservative rivals.
Yet it is Europe, where the Merkel brand has been
pre-eminent for so long, which may prove her biggest end-of-career
disappointment. Merkel has been outflanked by the reform agenda espoused by
Emmanuel Macron. France’s brash new president seeks greater European
integration in financial matters, eurozone policy, development and defence.
Another, separate bust-up looms over funding the EU’s first post-Brexit budget
shortfall.
Many in Germany suspect Macron wants Berlin to foot the bill
for his grand plan. Smaller EU states are suspicious, too. Popular pressure is
for less Brussels, not more – witness the Eurosceptic mood in Italy and Greece.
Rather than build a more united Europe, Macron’s ideas could tear it asunder.
Merkel’s response has been characteristically cautious. But
the sense that she has lost the initiative, and is no longer the leading lady
holding things together, is palpable. And, behind her back, Germany’s nationalists
and populists skulk like thieves in the night, with knives drawn.
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