NEWS FEATURES:WHEN GERMAN VOTERS go to the polls next weekend they are likely to return to office a woman they like, but about whom they know almost nothing. It is four years since she became chancellor of Germany and Angela Merkel is still the country's most popular politician. Rivals are still waiting for her put a foot wrong, while German journalists will, in dark moments, admit they have yet to decipher this former East German physicist who has Europe's most populous country as her laboratory, writes DEREK SCALLYin Berlin
No one knows where she is politically or where she wants to lead Germany, yet more than 70 per cent of voters want to see her back as chancellor. Little wonder that the general election campaign of her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) has been All About Angela.
The market square of the northern city of Schwerin looks particularly pretty on this sunny September afternoon. Angela Merkel waves at cheering bystanders as she strides through the capital of her home state of Mecklenburg. “We want a steady government, we have no time for experiments, we need to get to work for the good of the people,” says a stern Merkel in a woolly end to a woolly speech promising more growth, more jobs and more spending on education. No facts, no figures, no proposals – and that suits people just fine.
“I find her appealing, I like her calm style, direct without being brash or rough,” says middle-aged local woman Angela Linkner, clutching a CDU balloon. “I liked her speech, though I don’t remember much of it. Politicians don’t keep their election promises anyway.”
Meanwhile, a twentysomething supporter of the rival Social Democrats (SPD) looks on in irritated disbelief. “Voters simply don’t want real content!” she says.
Merkel learned that lesson with a novel general election campaign concept: tell voters the truth. Germany was crippled by high unemployment, low growth and dizzying debts, she told them, and only further social cuts and tax hikes could help the country in the long term.Voters listened politely, then abandoned ship on election day. Merkel’s CDU finished the election ahead, but only by a hair’s breadth.
She made it into office after some fancy political footwork, but what was the third coup of her political career had almost been her last.
HER FIRST COUPwas attracting Helmut Kohl's attention in 1990 when, as a young East German woman fresh to politics, she embodied in one person two quotas he had to fill at his cabinet table. As a former East German scientist and a Protestant, divorced and childless, few expected her to get far in the stuffy, Catholic, men-only CDU. But being patronised by Kohl – in both senses of the word – allowed her to rise, quiet and underestimated, in his ample shadow.
Her second political coup was seizing the CDU leadership in April 2000 after dispatching a scandal-tainted Kohl and his successor, Wolfgang Schäuble.
And after the 2005 election, facing the prospect of heading a lame-duck cross-party administration, she managed to turn things around based on skills she picked up as a physicist in East Berlin.
Few traces remain of the Central Institute for Physical Chemistry in the suburb of Adlershof, part of the East German Academy of Sciences. The campus is now a business park, and the building where Merkel had her office has been demolished. The hunt for what is left of her scientific past leads past “Knut’s Sauna Club” to a long, squat building with a glass door. On the first floor is a low-ceilinged room with six windows and an old green blackboard on one wall. This is where, in 1986, Merkel defended her doctoral thesis – succesfully – to become Dr Angela Merkel.
Watching her in action that day was colleague Lydia Dessau, who still works at Adlershof. “I remember seeing her slip by in a pretty little dress. Otherwise she always wore trousers,” recalls Dr Dessau. “She defended her thesis very well.”
She remembers Merkel as a friendly, funny, dependable and “incredibly intelligent” colleague whose research overlapped with her own: analysing the reaction speed of molecules in gas plasma at high temperatures. The two spent long evenings in the cellar of the institute compiling statistical models by feeding coded slot cards into a primitive computer. Dessau describes the work as methodical and slow, not lending itself to guesswork. Merkel has brought that approach to her chancellery, where theory is rejected in favour of problem-solving in small, certain steps.
Her work ethic is remarkable: on the morning after the Berlin Wall was breached in November 1989 – as the rest of the country nursed a collective hangover – she showed up for work as usual. But the scientific world wouldn’t have her for much longer. In 1990, with the Academy of Sciences winding up around her, the 35-year-old Merkel found a new laboratory where the molecules were politicians and voters, the experiments elections.
Her last words to Lydia Dessau as she cleared out her desk were: “Politics fascinates me so!” These days, the fascination is mutual, and all the more so because of how Merkel holds herself in check at all times in public. Her private life is strictly off-limits and Germans rarely see her with her husband, Joachim Sauer. Occasional crumbs are fed to the public. The curiosity is huge.
“The fascination with Merkel lies in the fact that she plays the role of chancellor like somebody who didn’t rehearse,” wrote Prof Claude Haas of Berlin’s Humboldt University in Die Zeit newspaper. “But she is also stringent about making sure this effect is what comes across in the media.”
After learning the lesson from the 2005 campaign – no more honesty – this year’s CDU election campaign has been built entirely around the party leader. Huge posters of the smiling Merkel carry buzzwords such as “confidence” and “cleverness” followed by calming, empty slogans ( “We have the strength”, “We have the Chancellor”). The message is: vote CDU if you want Merkel. And what do you get if you vote Merkel? Ask after the election.
LIKE MANY WHOgrew up in socialist East Germany, Merkel carries inside her a mistrust towards strangers and a caution about what she can say where, when and to whom.
She was born in 1954 in Hamburg, but as a three-month-old baby was carried across the border into East Germany, by her father, a Lutheran pastor who had been posted there.
“Her mother always told her, ‘you have to be extra good as a pastor’s daughter here’,” says a former teacher, Hans-Ulrich Beeskow. Good grades, he says, helped Merkel neutralise the baggage that came with being from a religious family in atheist East Germany.
The inner flexibility required to get through daily life in the vanished east has served her well in public life. Since becoming chancellor, Merkel has given new life to the old Bismarck line, “politics is the art of the possible”. She decided that, after voters had forced her into a compromise coalition with her political rivals, then compromise was what voters would get.
From health reform to tax reform, one compromise followed another. And the public, exhausted after years of swingeing Schröder-era reforms, made not a peep of complaint. But there are a few policy points on which Merkel won’t compromise, such as issues of personal freedom (arising from her East German experiences) and a strategy that is pro-EU, pro-US and pro-Israel. The rest, it seems, is negotiable.
“She has an extremely well-developed sense for recognising the majority opinion of Germany,” says biographer Prof Gerd Langguth. “She doesn’t embody the core CDU voters at all. In fact, with her pragmatic positions, she is really her own best floating voter.”
Though far from a pushover in negotiations, foreign leaders report that she is happy to jettison a position if it stands in the way of a deal.
The interesting thing about meeting Merkel in private is how similar she seems to her public persona. This either means that she never lets her guard down except with close confidantes, or that she is as she is. Perhaps both. There are no airs; her manner is straight-forward but never rude. She listens closely to questions and gives well-thought-out answers without, of course, always answering. During all of this, she fixes her cornflower-blue eyes on her questioner for visual clues as to whether her answer has hit home.
Dealing with journalists didn’t come easy to her at the start, as was clear at our first meeting in the mint-tinted calm of the Chancellery in 2006. Unknown to her, I could see her approaching the meeting room and saw her, literally, take a deep breath to steel herself before walking in.
At our second meeting last year, she was more sure of herself. The financial crisis was dragging down world economies and state stimulus packages were the rescue of choice. But Merkel was watching and waiting it out – to the frustration of other world leaders – until she was convinced that an expensive stimulus package was the only option.
Now, as the economic crisis rolls on, most Germans seem happy to give four more years to someone they feel will get the job done, pragmatically and responsibly. “People feel well-represented by her, they feel she is reliable and won’t go mad,” says author Alexander Osang. “In the crisis, she has played her role utterly calmly, without any excitement and, in German politics, there is still no one like her.”
Merkel on politics and power
1992I'm not one of the most hard-boiled politicians, but I know that I'll come through
1993I can't imagine the rest of my life like this. In a nomadic existence like this, something gets lost along the way
1994I can only depend on myself and my instincts
1997In taking on a greater political role I have changed, also as a private person. I'm no longer the person I used to be
2006The good thing is to be able to change things with plans that go into action and not into the bin
2008I don't let myself get caught up in unnecessary battles. The best form of relaxation for me? Sleeping, fresh air and even a little cooking
– As told to photographer Herlinde Koelbl, whose retrospective exhibition is running in Berlin