If they make ever make Angela Merkel: the Movie, the last week will be one of the more entertaining episodes.
It began last Monday evening with an improvised one-woman comedy on the stage of Berlin’s Maxim Gorki theatre and ended on Friday with rushed speeches and frenzied applause on the Bundestag’s floor and balconies.
Whether in parliament or in school, a giddy atmosphere always prevails on the last day of term. And so it was when, 16 years after Germany introduced civil partnerships for same-sex couples, the Bundestag voted by a large majority for marriage equality. Two years late, Germany finally pulled level with Ireland.
Presiding over events, wearing an inscrutable expression, was the woman who made it possible: Merkiavelli.
It was a historic and instructive moment that explains why, after three exhausting terms in office, Germany’s chancellor is powering on towards four more years in power in September.
Even now, as the dust settles in Berlin, no one knows if Friday’s marriage equality vote from nowhere was all part of a cunning Merkel plan or a rhetorical accident.
Berlin Wall
If anything the last days have echoes of another historic moment in Germany history: the East Berlin press conference on November 9th, 1989, when politburo member Günther Schabowski stumbled his way through the announcement of new regulations allowing East Germans go west without paperwork. Asked by an Italian journalist when these new regulations came into effect, Mr Schabowski said: “As far as I can tell: immediately.”
He was wrong but it was too late: hours later, crowds streamed across the checkpoints and the Berlin Wall was history.
Some 28 years later, a gay man asked Merkel at a public meeting when he could finally marry his boyfriend. Five minutes of floundering later, the chancellor finally said: instead of forcing through marriage equality under the party whip, she’d like it discussed and resolved as a “question of conscience”.
Pressure had been building on the marriage equality issue since Ireland’s 2015 vote left Germans horrified that “even the Catholic Irish” had overtaken them on this major social issue. Now, three months before Germany’s federal election, things were coming to a head. Aware of Merkel’s hesitancy on the issue, every one of her potential coalition partners after September’s election came out to make marriage equality a condition of a new government.
And so Merkel’s Monday night remarks were a planned or improvised attempt to put the issue, unresolved, on the back burner until after September’s federal election. But the gay marriage genie was out of the bottle and, by Tuesday morning, her Social Democrat (SPD) junior coalition partners joined the smaller opposition parties in demanding a free vote. It looked as if Merkel’s gay marriage gamble had gone astray.
Merkel's hesitation over marriage equality has nothing to do with her personal views or long-term strategy for German society and everything to do with her mastery of short-term political tactics. She knew that marriage equality on her watch would be one modernisation step too far for many older conservatives in the ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Many of them mourn the old Helmut Kohl party and resent the woman they blame for homogenising it into a centrist party they no longer recognise.
Political pirouettes
In chasing the younger, urban vote, Merkel has buried one core CDU policy after another: compulsory military service, nuclear energy and opposition to the minimum wage. Each time she performed an elegant pirouette, stealing an issue she previously opposed from her political opponents. But backing of conditional European bailouts was the final straw for her CDU conservatives, who were sold the euro on a no-bailout promise. Fearing marriage equality would make her put-upon conservatives snap, Merkel voted with them to oppose marriage equality.
For Germany’s gay community, this is the best and worst of times. Last week, after years of campaigning, the Bundestag finally voted to rescind an estimated 50,000 criminal convictions against homosexuals in the postwar period. A week later, four days after Merkel opened the door a crack, MPs have backed marriage equality. But Germany’s decision to extend to all the fundamental right was diminished by mutual accusations of political opportunism, superficial Bundestag speeches and a rushed vote.
Time will tell whether Germans – in particular gay voters – remember Merkel as the chancellor who opened the door to the marriage equality vote, or the woman who, for 12 years, withheld a fundamental right to all for party political reasons.
If politics is the art of the possible, Merkel is its supreme artist who will always choose tactics over strategy. For good or ill, that will define her political legacy.