Sunday

28th May 2023

Analysis

Angela Merkel, too powerful to fail?

  • Merkel's bid for re-election as most powerful EU leader comes against a backdrop of weak partners and mistake-prone challengers (Photo: s_zeimke)

German Chancellor Angela Merkel's New Year speech had a rather unusual opening: "2013 will be a year of many 50 year-celebrations. Fifty years ago, the New Year's classic [sketch] 'Dinner for one' was recorded in Hamburg, the first Bundesliga [football] match took place and the German inventor Walter Bruch presented his colour-TV system named PAL."

She then struck a more serious tone, mentioning the fiftieth anniversary of John F Kennedy's famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech and, lastly, the signature of the Elysee treaty between France and Germany pledging reconciliation after two world wars.

Read and decide

Join EUobserver today

Become an expert on Europe

Get instant access to all articles — and 20 years of archives. 14-day free trial.

... or subscribe as a group

The British sketch "Dinner for one" she chose to mention says something about the chancellor's appetite for irony.

Broadcast for decades as part of the German New Year's TV programme, it portrays an old lady having dinner and drinks with a butler who has to impersonate her four deceased friends sitting around the table.

In 2011, the German public TV ARD did a parody of the sketch with Merkel featuring in the role of the old lady and Nicolas Sarkozy, then president of France, as her submissive butler during one of the countless euro-crisis summits.

"The problem is, there are no more important statesmen left in Europe, there is only Madame Merkel," the mock-Sarkozy complained.

This year, in tone with the general elections in autumn, ARD did a remake of the parody with Merkel's Social-Democratic contender Peer Steinbrueck in the role of the butler.

Both images bear some truth.

In Europe, Merkel is the uncontested leader and at home no other politician is as popular as she is.

In spite of all grumbling of French President Francois Hollande and street protests in Athens or Lisbon, her vision of a "step by step" reform process, of "homework" before "solidarity" has prevailed.

Be it banking union or adjustments to the Greek bailout, nothing can be agreed until Germany nods first. And Germans respect and trust her for that.

To those predicting a better 2013 - both European Commission chief Barroso and France's Hollande recently proclaimed the worst of the euro-crisis is over - Merkel warned of troubled times still to come.

"The first effects of the reforms are showing. But we still need a lot of patience, the sovereign debt crisis is by far not over. And more needs to be done to supervise financial markets, the world has not yet learned its lesson from the devastating financial crisis of 2008," she said in the New Year's address.

With allies like these

If among EU leaders, Merkel seems unchallenged, on a national level, her high approval rates (over 70%) indicate the same. But her party - currently leading the polls at around 40 percent - will still have to find a coalition partner after the general elections. And that is already proving to be quite a headache.

Merkel's current coalition partner, the Liberal Free Democrats (FDP), are in a downwards spiral and busy tearing each other apart.

Philipp Roesler, the country's economy minister and FDP's party leader, is having trouble quelling the voices of dissent within the party. On Sunday (6 January), during a party meeting, Roesler was booed and somebody from the audience shouted "you're an asshole."

"God may have invented the FDP only to test us," Merkel quipped last month at her own party congress, citing a line from a satire show.

With regional elections in Lower Saxony on 20 January, the FDP's freefall may also cost her the loss of a respected governor from her own Christian Democratic Union (CDU) who needs the Liberals to score at least five percent to remake the local coalition.

But in a press conference on Saturday, Merkel refused to draw any parallel between what will happen in Lower Saxony in two weeks' time and the general elections in the fall.

That is because her options remain open for other constellations - another "Grand Coalition" with the Social-Democrats or even an alliance with the Greens, who are riding high in the polls and have moved more to the centre of the political spectrum.

Merkel's clumsy contender

Meanwhile, the chances of the opposition Social Democrats winning the election with Peer Steinbrueck as their chancellor candidate appear to be dwindling. A poll end of December ranked him fourth among Germany's most popular politicians, at 54 percent, almost twenty points behind Merkel.

Dubbed "Problem-Peer" by German media, Steinbrueck is an economist who served as Merkel's finance minister during the Grand Coalition of 2005-2009. He is also a protegee of ex-chancellor Helmut Schmidt.

But as Liberal politician Rainer Bruederle put it on Sunday, "between Schmidt and Steinbrueck there is a universe of faux-pas."

In October, Steinbrueck got into trouble when it emerged that he had concealed some of his revenues from speaking at bankers' conferences and other gatherings.

Barely was that scandal silenced when the ex-minister made claimed that chancellors do not earn enough in Germany - a remark that was met with widespread bemusement, if not irritation.

For now, Steinbrueck firmly rejects any prospect of ever redoing the Grand Coalition with Angela Merkel. But if his series of mishaps continues, this may be the inevitable outcome for his party.

Make-or-break elections for Merkel coalition partner

Regional elections in Lower Saxony on Sunday are being seen as a barometer for Germany's general elections in autumn, with Chancellor Merkel's junior coalition partner struggling for survival.

MEPs to urge block on Hungary taking EU presidency in 2024

"This will be the first time a member state that is under the Article 7 procedure will take over the rotating presidency of the council," French Green MEP Gwendoline Delbos-Corfield, the key lawmaker on Hungary, warned.

European Parliament scales back luxury MEP pension fund

The European Parliament's Bureau, a political body composed of the president and its vice-presidents, decided to slash payouts from the fund by 50 percent, freeze automatic indexations, and increase the pension age from 65 to 67.

WhoisWho? Calls mount to bring back EU directory

NGOs and lobbyists slammed the EU commission for removing contact details of non-managerial staff from its public register, arguing that the institution is now less transparent.

Exclusive

MEP luxury pension held corporate assets in tax havens

While the European Parliament was demanding a clamp down on tax havens, many of its own MEPs were using their monthly office allowances to finance a luxury pension scheme that held corporate assets in the Cayman Islands, Bermuda and elsewhere.

Column

What a Spanish novelist can teach us about communality

In a world where cultural clashes and sectarianism seems to be on the increase, Spanish novelist Javier Cercas (b.1962) takes the opposite approach. He cherishes both life in the big city and in the countryside.

Opinion

Poland and Hungary's ugly divorce over Ukraine

What started in 2015 as a 'friends-with-benefits' relationship between Viktor Orbán and Jarosław Kaczyński, for Hungary and Poland, is ending in disgust and enmity — which will not be overcome until both leaders leave.

Latest News

  1. How the EU's money for waste went to waste in Lebanon
  2. EU criminal complicity in Libya needs recognition, says expert
  3. Europe's missing mails
  4. MEPs to urge block on Hungary taking EU presidency in 2024
  5. PFAS 'forever chemicals' cost society €16 trillion a year
  6. EU will 'react as appropriate' to Russian nukes in Belarus
  7. The EU needs to foster tech — not just regulate it
  8. EU: national energy price-spike measures should end this year

Stakeholders' Highlights

  1. International Sustainable Finance CentreJoin CEE Sustainable Finance Summit, 15 – 19 May 2023, high-level event for finance & business
  2. ICLEISeven actionable measures to make food procurement in Europe more sustainable
  3. World BankWorld Bank Report Highlights Role of Human Development for a Successful Green Transition in Europe
  4. Nordic Council of MinistersNordic summit to step up the fight against food loss and waste
  5. Nordic Council of MinistersThink-tank: Strengthen co-operation around tech giants’ influence in the Nordics
  6. EFBWWEFBWW calls for the EC to stop exploitation in subcontracting chains

Stakeholders' Highlights

  1. InformaConnecting Expert Industry-Leaders, Top Suppliers, and Inquiring Buyers all in one space - visit Battery Show Europe.
  2. EFBWWEFBWW and FIEC do not agree to any exemptions to mandatory prior notifications in construction
  3. Nordic Council of MinistersNordic and Baltic ways to prevent gender-based violence
  4. Nordic Council of MinistersCSW67: Economic gender equality now! Nordic ways to close the pension gap
  5. Nordic Council of MinistersCSW67: Pushing back the push-back - Nordic solutions to online gender-based violence
  6. Nordic Council of MinistersCSW67: The Nordics are ready to push for gender equality

Join EUobserver

Support quality EU news

Join us