Digital Be informed with the essential news and opinion. Delivery to your home or office Monday to Saturday FT Weekend paper — a stimulating blend of news and lifestyle features ePaper access — the digital replica of the printed newspaper. Team or Enterprise Premium FT. Pay based on use. Does my organisation subscribe? Group Subscription. Voters oblige themselves to remain calm and reasonable, to not fundamentally question the current political and economic conditions.
What remains? People will continue to feel that they are neither heard nor understood. The result is a kind of persistent schizophrenia between voter apathy and the acting out of rage in the social media. At times when I think of Germany today, an image comes to my mind that is familiar to many older Germans who experienced the air raids in the last war.
I see a group of people huddled together in a bomb shelter who hear the detonations come closer and closer. And they keep ducking their heads, hoping the war will soon end by itself.
For now, Germany is effectively willing the ends but not the means. Why this stasis? Because Germany has been doing quite nicely, thank you. It has not felt the pain that, one way or another, most other parts of the continent have experienced. Crisis, what crisis? The German economy has done well over this period. But it has also profited very significantly from external circumstances. The post opening-up of Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and their subsequent accession to the European single market gave a wonderful opportunity for German manufacturers to relocate production facilities just next door, using cheap skilled labour in a kind of Mitteleuropa 2.
Not least, the euro has kept the German currency at a lower external exchange rate than it would otherwise have soared to witness what happened to the Swiss franc. So the German export machine has powered ahead, generating eye-popping trade surpluses. Angry voters told me they were convinced eurozone rules had been designed in powerful Germany's interest, to favour its lucrative export industry. They said they failed to see the point of being in a European union or common market if stronger, richer members like Germany didn't help the weaker, struggling ones.
Where were German taxpayers when you needed them, they wanted to know. This leads to another criticism levelled at Angela Merkel: that ultimately hers was a Germany First doctrine in Europe. Hardly surprising, you might say. Firstly, because every elected leader is likely to prioritise their nation. But then - and this is peculiar to Germany - because of its Nazi past. Germans and their chancellors are often painfully wary about taking on a prominent leadership role in international circles.
Chancellor Merkel intervened to rescue the eurozone, but she also provoked a deep north-south divide within the EU. A divide that reappeared during the migrant crisis and at the start of the Covid pandemic - with southern Europeans feeling abandoned, to face the brunt of these emergencies. Until they no longer were. Largely thanks again to Angela Merkel, even if she tended to act very late in the day. The Covid crisis, unlike the euro crisis before it, persuaded her that richer countries like Germany should indeed shoulder debts of poorer EU countries, in this case those suffering disproportionate economic effects of the pandemic.
In so doing, she set a striking precedent in the EU. A radical position for a German chancellor to take, especially considering traditional pressures at home to carefully balance the books. He described it to me as a game-changer for the EU thanks to Angela Merkel's courage: "She proved to be able to take decisions against the current way of thinking in Germany and in favour of the better integration and better efficiency of the European continent.
Another point of view is that once again Angela Merkel was acting first and foremost in Germany's best interest. She possibly became all too aware the EU's single market could collapse if Italy, Spain, France or others were suffocating economically because of the pandemic.
The market is a key money-earner for German business. So Angela Merkel the crisis manager rolled up her sleeves and took dramatic, pragmatic action. It made history and headlines in Germany and beyond. Though not quite to the heady extent sparked by Merkel's answer to the EU migrant crisis. When in late summer Angela Merkel opened Germany's borders to more than a million refugees and asylum seekers, she made front pages the world over - lauded by some, derided by others. Back home, some proudly boasted of their country's Willkommenkultur , their culture of welcoming others, symbolised by Angela Merkel.
Others, incensed by the arrivals, flocked to the far-right AfD, spurring it to become the first extreme-right party to win seats in Germany's federal parliament since the end of World War Two. The impact of her migration decision on the EU was as considerable, as it was mixed. The EU won the Nobel Peace prize in Yet, just three years later, its member states were slamming their frontiers shut on one another to keep out refugees, many of them fleeing the war in Syria.
The German leader's actions helped resuscitate the bloc's reputation as a key defender of human rights, set out in Article 2 of the EU's founding principles. Even though the chancellor herself was reluctant, he apparently pushed her to run for a fourth term.
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