Merkel’s political legacy in Germany crumbles in face of Russian invasion

The first cracks in Angela Merkel’s political legacy appeared just 78 days into her well-earned retirement, when Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine. A month on, many Germans are now asking previously unthinkable questions of their four-term leader.

“Why did the clever and incorruptible Merkel, someone who apparently always thought things through backwards from the end, not see this coming?” asked the weekly Die Zeit, before answering its own question: she “only ever thought things through tactically, from the logic of each respective negotiating situation”.

Being described as a supreme tactician rather than a strategist is not a new criticism of Angela Merkel. But her most strident critics say it was an egregious failing in her 16 years negotiating with Russian president Vladimir Putin.

Merkel’s East German childhood, knowledge of Russian and grasp of old apparatchik mentalities made her the go-to woman, from Brussels to Washington, during Putin’s regular crises and military machinations – against Georgia in 2008 and then in Ukraine.

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At the peak of her powers in 2015, she negotiated for 17 hours straight in the Belarusian capital to secure a ceasefire and what became known as the Minsk protocol.

"Given her experiences with Putin, it must have been completely clear that this man isn't to be trusted"

But no matter how far Putin went in the years since, Merkel limited her criticism to a tight, diplomatic vocabulary: the annexation of Crimea was “unacceptable”; poisoning his enemies was “not in keeping with our values”.

Through it all, her officials insisted it was important to keep talking with Putin’s Russia. It was a pragmatic – and profitable – approach for Germany and, according to Der Spiegel magazine, no longer a good look.

“Given her experiences with Putin, it must have been completely clear that this man isn’t to be trusted,” suggested the news magazine. “It’s a puzzle why Merkel didn’t undertake anything to release the close economic connections between Germany and Russia, above all in energy.”

Nord Stream

Germany imports almost two-thirds of its energy, with about a third of its oil and more than half of its natural gas coming from Russia.

After years of decline after 1990, dropping at one point to below 40 per cent, Russian gas began to rebuild market share from 2009, though the real renaissance came two years later.

In March 2011 then chancellor Merkel announced the shutdown of German nuclear plants within a decade, her snap response to the Fukushima disaster. Nine months later, Nord Stream 1 began operation and the share of Russian gas in Germany’s energy mix jumped beyond 55 per cent. Berlin even rebranded the fossil fuel a “bridging technology” to aid Germany’s green energy transformation.

A decade-old Merkel refrain that the Nord Stream pipeline and its successor were “a purely business matter” – despite being controlled by Russian state-owned companies – continued under chancellor Olaf Scholz until Christmas.

A close friend of Merkel has another theory: eventually she began to orient her politics more with an eye on her personal popularity than political necessity

He and other leading politicians in Berlin are wary of criticising Merkel openly now given how, apart from the Green Party, she governed with most of them since 2005.

But the critical voices are building, led by her long-term rival Friedrich Merz, now her successor as leader of the centre-right Christian Democratic Union.

In a recent Bundestag debate Merz said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had collapsed German foreign and security policy into “a pile of rubble”.

Wartime dead

Others in her CDU, struggling to explain their support for the Merkel line, blame uniquely German traumata over wartime dead, in particular Russian.

A close friend of Merkel has another theory: eventually, like many politicians, she began to orient her politics more with an eye on her personal popularity than political necessity. Russian energy deliveries ticked two boxes German voters love: cheap and reliable.

Prof Klaus Schubert, a political scientist at the University of Münster, said Merkel mastered the German style of politics to “do nothing, and do no one any harm”.

“Merkel’s understanding of leadership was always binding together ideas and waiting for the right moment to ‘proclaim’ a decision,” he said. In this, though, she acted “within the European mainstream”.

Coming to his successor’s rescue this week was ex-chancellor Gerhard Schröder, now a disgraced energy lobbyist for Russia. Avoiding any specific mention of her – or Vladimir Putin – he blamed all post-1990 leaders for failing to create a new security architecture that reflected the end of the cold war bipolar order.

“The war in Ukraine,” he said, “is the result of this political failure.”