Angela Merkel’s Unfinished Business

Angela Merkel has a face she makes when things don’t go according to plan. She has arrived in Recklinghausen, a city in Germany’s industrial Ruhr district, to deliver a stump speech at a rally of her Christian Democratic Union party (CDU) ahead of elections on Sept. 22. As protesters whistle and heckle, she narrows her eyes and stares into the distance. This isn’t an angry expression. Merkel is doggedness personified.

Germany’s first female Chancellor and the first raised behind the Iron Curtain has already gone down in history as a trailblazer. Now, after nearly eight years in charge of Europe’s richest nation, with her policies affecting the citizens of the entire euro zone and rippling outward to capital cities around the globe, she is pushing for a third four-year term. She looks likely to succeed.

That alone makes her remarkable. The euro-zone crisis has derailed or damaged most leaders in its vortex. Merkel has thrived. A poll published on Aug. 23, the day of the rally, reveals that 63% of voters favor her return to office. Her nearest rival, the Social Democrats’ Peer Steinbrück, lags at 29%. The CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, enjoy an advantage of about 15 percentage points. But the quirks of the German electoral system, designed amid the rubble of Adolf Hitler’s dictatorship to dissipate power rather than concentrate it, mean that Merkel has a real battle on her hands — and so she fights, rally by rally, town by town.

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Ralf Möller greets her at the Recklinghausen podium. The 6-ft. 5-in. (196 cm) former champion bodybuilder and Gladiator actor (he played Hagen, a Germanic barbarian, in the Oscar-winning epic), who was born in the city and these days is literally big in Hollywood, has flown from Los Angeles to lend his considerable muscle to Merkel’s cause. “This is what I admire,” he says, watching his petite heroine plow on with her speech. “She overcomes.”

Nothing showcases the steady, reliable, fuss-free Merkel brand better than adversity — and this campaign season is serving up plenty. Greece is ripe for another bailout. The crisis in Syria has raised uncomfortable questions about Germany’s willingness to match its economic heft to its responsibilities as a global citizen. And allegations about the scooping up of German data by the U.S. National Security Agency are roiling public opinion. Protesters at the rally blow whistles and brandish a banner emblazoned with the slogan NIE WIEDER ÜBERWACHUNGSSTAAT — never again a surveillance state.

None of the protesters appear much older than 30; for younger Germans, any debate about freedom — and its curtailment — is primarily intellectual. For Merkel, who spent the first 36 of her 59 years navigating a society that embroiled hundreds of thousands of her compatriots in spying on the others, there is no such abstraction. Communist East Germany shaped the reflexes of caution and concealment that originally helped Merkel swerve and maneuver her way to high office and put the iron in her soul that keeps her fighting to stay there.

The German economy is giving her a helping hand, with the latest data showing a narrow budget surplus, moderate growth and unemployment at 6.8%, close to its lowest ebb in two decades. To enjoy similar prosperity — and in return for German largesse — the weaker euro-zone nations must reform. That is Merkel’s mantra. “Solidarity makes sense if we all work to become better, fitter,” she tells the Recklinghausen crowd. “Otherwise we’ll become weaker together.”

Her critics say this is happening already on Merkel’s watch. Greece isn’t the only country that has been slow to make structural reforms. Merkel has governed in what she calls “small steps,” avoiding the sort of big, transformative initiatives that might, for example, bolster Germany against challenges like its rapidly aging population. She has calmed the strains in the euro zone by deploying what German philosopher Jürgen Habermas recently dubbed “tranquilizing fiddling about.” Even her friends admit that under the Merkel administration, there hasn’t been a clear vision for Germany’s international role and responsibility. “With the importance Germany now has in the world, you can’t be undecided,” says Lothar de Maizière, Merkel’s first political mentor, who served as elected leader of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) before its absorption into reunited Germany.

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Merkel’s opponents hope her record of inaction will lose her the election. She seeks to counter their attacks with something rarely seen in postwar Germany — a campaign based on personality. That’s all the more startling because Merkel, under close scrutiny since she took the CDU’s helm in 2000, remains an enigma. More than any other Chancellor of modern times, Merkel is Germany, personifying the nation’s seemingly contradictory impulses to be a world power and keep a low profile. Understand Merkel and you understand why this election matters to Europeans and economies that are dependent on European success — and why the vote, irrespective of its outcome, won’t deliver the faster, more flexible Germany they want.

A Star in the East
Templin sits encircled by medieval city walls and bounded by something less tangible: a sense of small-town reserve. Curtains twitch. Strangers are immediately conspicuous. The focus on the Kasner family when they settled in this corner of the GDR with their baby daughter in 1954 was intense. They were exotic anomalies: Westerners choosing to live in the East. Not only that, but Horst Kasner was also a Protestant pastor who saw it as his mission to work in the GDR and so lived under constant suspicion of sedition.

Angela Kasner — people who have known her since childhood pronounce her name not with a hard G but softly, Ong-uh-lah — learned to blend in to the point of near invisibility. In school photos, a waning crescent of cheek or glimpse of pudding-basin haircut are the only signs that the future Chancellor was actually present. Her flat-footed running style appears to have been distinctive enough to remain in the memory (“She was about as unsporty as it’s possible to be,” says Carola Moock, her contemporary at school and now a pediatrician), but otherwise, apart from one pivotal, traumatic moment, Kasner stood out only for her scholarship.

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She took gold at a regional mathematics olympiad, an annual competition pitting schoolkids against one another in academic subjects. She twice won the top prize for Russian at the olympiad. Erika Benn, the teacher who coached her to victory, says her star pupil easily mastered the language but struggled to acquire the interpersonal skills to sell a Russian poem. “She wouldn’t even look up,” says Benn. “I said to her, ‘Can’t you smile a bit?'”

It may seem counterintuitive that a girl without natural social skills should grow up to beguile so many, but you only have to see Merkel’s fans gathered in Recklinghausen to appreciate the affection she inspires. “I find her wonderful, not just as a politician but a strong woman,” says Jil Schulden, 19, a recent high school graduate. Such sentiments are commonplace in Germany and across a wide demographic.

There are criticisms, certainly. The Chancellor has acquired several nicknames: “Merkiavelli” and “the Black Widow,” for her ability to sidle up unnoticed before delivering a deadly bite. To her supporters, she’s Angie. But everyone in Germany knows her as “Mutti,” mommy.

For many Germans, it’s an endearment and a reflection of their lingering surprise that they put Merkel in charge in the first place. When she ran for the chancellorship in 2005, “the main question in the campaign was ‘Kann die das?’ Is she able to do this? With a negative touch. Nobody is asking that anymore,” says Ursula von der Leyen, who has served as a minister in both Merkel governments.

If Merkel is a unifier more than a polarizer, that may be because her life intertwines the strands of a country that was formed as recently as 1871, torn by two world wars and stitched back together less than 23 years ago. Nor did the transformations stop with reunification, which gave impetus to Germany’s reinvention as a more relaxed, tolerant nation.

Merkel’s “very Protestant, very Prussian” family, as de Maizière remembers the Kasners, instilled a profound work ethic in their eldest daughter and ambitions that appeared to have limited room for expression. West German women tended to stay at home. East Germans faced different barriers.

At 18, Merkel nearly came unstuck. At the end of each school term, GDR pupils performed cultural programs. In a “snap decision” that Moock says arose from boredom rather than a desire to shock, Merkel’s class opted to sing “The Internationale,” the hymn of the workers’ struggle, not in German or Russian but in English. The pupils compounded this sign of nascent dissidence by reading a poem containing the phrase “the wall.” It wasn’t in reference to the fortifications that at the time divided Germany, but it was still enough to trigger a weeklong interrogation of the whole class by the Stasi, the feared secret police. The authorities initially withdrew Merkel’s permission to take a degree in physical chemistry. Her father had to work every possible contact to enable his daughter to study.

Slow and Steady
Merkel and her main challenger, the SPD’s Steinbrück, have confronted each other directly only once during this campaign, in a televised debate on Sept. 1. The most revealing moment came when Steinbrück accused Merkel of waiting too long for Washington to provide information on the scale of the NSA’s spying activities. She smiled — she has learned to smile — before saying, “I don’t act first and consider later, but do it the other way round.”

Merkel prefers to avoid speedy decisions, and not just because of her formative tangle with the Stasi. There was a damaging flip-flop on nuclear power in the wake of Japan’s Fukushima disaster, when she reversed her decision to prolong the life of some facilities and ordered their accelerated closure.

She’s also haunted by the Deauville debacle. At a summit at the French seaside resort in 2010, she and France’s then President Nicolas Sarkozy made a pact to make investors holding bonds in any country requesting a bailout accept a share of the losses. This was meant to mitigate the burden on the taxpayers funding the bailouts — top of the list, German taxpayers — but instead raised the specter that euro-zone countries might actually default. The euro plunged into a new spiral of pain.

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The usual Merkel style of decisionmaking is methodical. “She goes at it like a physicist,” says Dirk Kurbjuweit, a journalist with the weekly Der Spiegel and the author of a Merkel biography. “She wants to solve problems. The bigger the problem, the bigger the chance of a Nobel Prize.”

The biggest problem on Merkel’s plate is Europe’s debt crisis, but her handling of it has won as many brickbats as prizes, not least in Washington. In July 2012, facing his own re-election battle and watching the travails of the euro zone damage the U.S. recovery, President Obama dispatched Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to persuade Merkel to apply short-term stimulus. Before embarking for Germany, Geithner described Europe as being “on the edge of an abyss.” He came away without fresh concessions.

Amid signs of a recovery in some hard-hit European countries, Merkel continues to resist pressure to mutualize euro-zone debt to reduce borrowing costs for weaker countries and stands by the doctrine of austerity that has seen unemployment spiraling upward in those same countries. “She [has driven] Europe into greater divisions and damaged the European project,” says Andrea Nahles, the general secretary of the SPD.

Angry Greeks who have caricatured Merkel as a new incarnation of Hitler would presumably agree. But their demonization of the German leader betrays a misapprehension: a change of Chancellor in Berlin would not necessarily herald the arrival of a more openhanded Germany.

By waiting until the abyss yawns before taking action, Merkel has succeeded in carrying most of Germany with her when she makes a move. A small Euroskeptic party called the Alternative für Deutschland may win its first seats in the election, but the European policies of the mainstream parties are closely aligned. In Parliament and among voters, there is broad recognition that Germany’s export-driven economy is dependent on the survival of the euro zone — never mind that German liabilities through bailout commitments already amount to $153 billion and could have the country on the hook for as much as $280 billion if the single currency implodes. Any German government will inch toward greater European integration to prevent the disintegration of the euro. And any German government will also find it hard to speed the process or take any significant steps toward surrendering sovereign powers to Brussels.

That’s because power in Germany is already widely distributed. The country’s turbulent history weighs heavy on its political establishment, counseling caution. German leaders shy away from stridency in international affairs and remain wary of military interventions. Merkel’s predecessor, the SPD’s Gerhard Schröder, spoke out against the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. In 2011, Merkel argued against the imposition of a no-fly zone in Libya. She has been swift to rule out any military participation in a strike against the Syrian regime too.

German federal structures include onerous checks and balances — a constitutional court with the ability to block intergovernmental deals, a political system that grants substantial powers to state legislatures and reliably deprives parties of overall majorities at the state and national level. In Merkel’s first term, she headed a grand coalition of CDU/CSU and SPD, with Steinbrück — her current rival for the Chancellery — serving as her Minister for Finance. In the past four years, she has worked with the economically liberal Free Democrats. The SPD is campaigning for a coalition with the Greens; Merkel aims to continue her current liaison with the Free Democrats. Polls point to another grand coalition, but any final constellation — and its priorities — will almost certainly be decided not just by voters but also in detailed coalition negotiations after the elections.

Putting Trust in Mother
In the final months of the GDR, de Maizière gave Merkel her break in politics, appointing her as his deputy spokeswoman. She shone. “Her briefings were half as long [as her colleagues’] but twice as information-rich,” says her former boss. He did ask his office manager to have a quiet word with Merkel on the eve of a diplomatic trip to Russia. “Please tell her to lose the Jesus sandals and buy some clothes better suited to public office,” he begged. Merkel turned up to work the next day in a new outfit but blushed when de Maizière complimented her on it.

She’s still not entirely comfortable with being looked at. “She would rather work than wave,” says her school contemporary Moock. But Merkel’s stolidity is now being showcased as an asset in a campaign devised by the Berlin-based agency Blumberry. The campaign emphasizes Merkel’s “authenticity, reliability, trustworthiness. Artificiality never works,” says Lutz Meyer, Blumberry’s managing partner.

The majority of imagery selected for Merkel’s Blumberry-designed website and print material has been drawn not from posed shoots but from real-life vignettes. The campaign’s must-have collectible is a booklet of photos of the Chancellor, including a few private shots from family albums, garnished with modest biographical details. Voters “rip [the booklets] out of our hands,” says a campaign insider.

Here is Merkel with her husband, a distinguished scientist called Joachim Sauer, who is even more publicity-averse than his wife. When Merkel was sworn in as Chancellor, he opted to watch the ceremony on TV. And here’s a much younger Angela pushing a doll in a buggy, playing mother, as the childless politician now plays mother to her entire country.

Ordinary citizens feel safer in Mutti’s care. The election could be seen as a rite of passage, giving voters a choice between the comforts of the government they know or striking out into the unknown. The SPD’s Nahles hopes to convince them that they need to cut loose from the apron strings in order to preserve their comforts. “This government will go into the German history books as the one that has made the fewest laws,” she says. “Staying still for a country means, in the end, going backward.”

Merkel agrees. In Recklinghausen, she speaks of the need to modernize Germany’s economy to meet the trials of globalization. But she also repeats her campaign slogan “erfolgreich zusammen” — successful together. Her message is that Germany is already on the right path. Small steps, not big ideas, are the way forward. “She’s so admired because the way she does things is close to the German soul,” says the campaign insider. Win or lose, Merkel represents contemporary Germany in all its complexity, a huge country that prefers to behave like a small one.

— with reporting by Jay Newton-Small / Washington