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Not even the blue blazer that set off Angela Merkel’s cornflower eyes could hide something else in her gaze on Sunday afternoon: a shadow of despair.
“The question of migration,” the German chancellor warned in a television interview, “can break Europe apart.”
Before then it may shatter everything she commands in Berlin: a fourth-term coalition, the political alliance at its heart and even her own political career.
Everything is at stake for the 63-year-old unless she can tame a political ally that, for the past week, has swung erratically between confrontation and conciliation.
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The Mexican stand-off rocking German politics is, on the surface, a delayed aftershock of Germany’s 2015-2016 refugee crisis in which Merkel’s Bavarian allies grudgingly backed her liberal approach. In reality, though, this is a bare-knuckle fight for power.
The fight was started by Merkel’s panicked Bavarian allies, the Christian Social Union (CSU). Three months before a state election, they latched on to tougher migration policy as their best hope to beat back the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Polls see the AfD impeding another CSU absolute majority in the Munich state parliament.
But the CSU determination to retain power in Bavaria, where it has ruled almost continuously since the war, has endangered another postwar certainty: the CSU’s 69-year political alliance with Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
Their joint parliamentary party in the Bundestag, so ubiquitous it is referred to as “the union”, has been a stabilising anchor in postwar German politics. But now that anchor has come loose and Merkel was at the tiller when it happened.
Far-right rising
The CSU blames the Merkel refugee strategy for opening a gap on the hard right of Germany’s political spectrum, a gap the AfD, then a fading bailout party, promptly filled and expanded.
AfD leader Alexander Gauland calls Merkel his party’s “life insurance” and, at the weekend, joked that the CDU/CSU drama reminded him of the dying days of East Germany.
For Merkel, raised in the vanished east, it was an outrageous comparison, compouned by the humiliation of being asked to respond on television.
“I don’t want to comment on that,” she said with a pained expression, insisting she didn’t “view the [AfD] as dangerous”.
Markus Söder is of another view. Bavaria’s CSU state premier is convinced that, to beat the AfD, he has to join them – with “asylum tourism” jibes and Merkel-must-go pot shots.
Even if the refugee row is resolved, and the CDU/CSU alliance patched up, Söder is playing a long game. Alongside CDU conservatives, weary of the Merkel era, he wants to rewire Germany in which the “era of orderly multilateralism is replaced by individual countries making decisions”.
Bavaria first today, Germany first tomorrow: this is a radical break with a postwar tradition in which German and European interests were defined by the late Helmut Kohl as “two sides of the same coin”.
CSU leader and federal interior minister Horst Seehofer is trapped between his two most bitter rivals: the Söder irresistible force and the immovable Merkel object. His on-off resignation offer is the last gasp of an exhausted political figure.