Abhorred by intellectuals, but woman who shows common touch has won over Germany
By Andrew Gimson in Berlin
(Filed: 04/09/2005)
Angela Merkel is a genius who gets mistaken for a village idiot. Unless she suffers some completely unexpected disaster, she will in two weeks' time become the most powerful politician in Europe by winning the German general election. Yet she is still generally written off by the German chattering classes as a dowdy nonentity whose rise to power is a mere fluke.
German intellectuals are incredibly rude about her. One of my oldest and most brilliant friends in Berlin said to me this week: "She is like a Russian tank. You would not want to sleep with a Russian tank, would you?"
Angela Merkel seems unstoppable two weeks from the election
A clever Berlin journalist resorted to similarly sexist language: "She looks like a janitor in a Romanian village. She is completely common and undistinguished, she's fat and boring.
"She's tactically intelligent, but in terms of any kind of content, you don't know what she believes in. When you look at Merkel you see a woman who's profoundly lost."
So I went to look at Mrs Merkel. On Wednesday I saw her speak in Karlsruhe, in south-west Germany, and on Thursday I watched her in Potsdam, just outside Berlin. On neither occasion did she look in the slightest bit lost. She looked and sounded like a woman who knows far better than her patronising male critics how Germany can be restored to health.
In Karlsruhe, Mrs Merkel came on stage on a very hot afternoon after a warm-up band had sung a medley of pop songs at ear-splitting volume. The lyrics were in English and so inappropriate that one could not help suspecting the musicians of saving their own pride by satirising the whole occasion.
"Waterloo, how would you feel if you won the war?" the lead singer, a middle-aged woman in an orange trouser suit, demanded. And: "I'm so excited that I just can't hide it."
Mrs Merkel frowned, as well she might during such a cacophony. Local dignitaries said a few superfluous words, whereupon she looked at her watch before sharing a joke with her neighbour. When Mrs Merkel smiles she is irresistibly reminiscent of Alec Guinness playing George Smiley in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
Mrs Merkel's smile says, as did Guinness's: "I know I don't look the part in this high-profile role. I strike you as chubby and self-effacing, the reverse of glamorous."
But study the smile more carefully and you find yourself invited to share a different kind of joke: that this person who seems so ineffectual is actually the bravest, toughest, most intelligent character in the entire show.
Mrs Merkel has enjoyed the great advantage during her meteoric ascent of being grotesquely under-estimated. Helmut Kohl imagined he could use her as a token woman and Easterner, and brought her into government as soon as Germany was reunified in 1989-90.
Mr Kohl naturally assumed that as a woman, and an Easterner, she was bound to be limited but he reckoned "the girl", as he called her (she was 35), might just be able to manage the ministry for women and youth. After four years he made her environment minister, in which capacity she served until he lost the general election of 1998.
Barely a year later, on December 22, 1999, Mrs Merkel finished Mr Kohl by telling him in public that he had to reveal the source of the money in his newly exposed secret bank accounts. German intellectuals insist to this day that Mrs Merkel could not possibly have done this off her own bat: that her deadly article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, in which she told fellow Christian Democrats that they must free themselves from Kohl, must have been written by Karl Feldmeyer, one of that paper's distinguished correspondents.
Feldmeyer, however, says that Mrs Merkel rang up to offer a piece on the unfolding scandal of the secret donations, and that five minutes after he had agreed the article arrived by fax.
The fact remains that Mrs Merkel was the only prominent Christian Democrat who saw that Mr Kohl was irretrievably tarnished, and had the honesty and ruthlessness to call on him to tell the whole truth about his illegal financial dealings.
Mrs Merkel's election speeches are characterised by the same virtues and are almost entirely concerned with the dreadful economic record of Gerhard Schröder, the Social Democrat who defeated Mr Kohl in 1998.
Mr Schröder declared when he came to power that he would not deserve re-election if he failed to bring unemployment down, yet during the seven years of his chancellorship it has risen to almost five million.
The German political class has for many years put off the vital task of economic reform. Mrs Merkel may have the strength, with her radical plan to simplify the tax system, to break through - although the German political system, which demands almost complete consensus before anything decisive can be done, offers enormous scope for Mrs Merkel's enemies to frustrate her.
Many of her own Christian Democrats hate being told what to do by a woman, and would prefer to stymie her by doing a deal after the elections with the Social Democrats. Her margin of victory, however, may well be too decisive for that to happen.
Overall, the German people are angry. It is a suppressed anger, and will not lead many of them down extreme paths: the past has inoculated them against that. But even more than in some other democracies, the people feel the politicians have deserted them.
Mrs Merkel is not immune to that charge. Many Easterners believe that she has "forgotten where she came from". Many Easterners - and not a few Westerners - also believe that in her determination to remain on good terms with the Americans, she has sold out to George W Bush and would have sent young German troops to die in Iraq.
Last week in Potsdam, in former East Germany, her speech on the economy was met with a chorus of angry whistles and jeers. She retorted that such behaviour would not have been countenanced in the old East Germany.
Kurt Dreilich, 63, the son of a farmer who was killed during the German advance to Stalingrad, had come specifically to demonstrate against Mrs Merkel. The family fled west from the advancing Russians and were almost killed when the British and Americans bombed Dresden. It gave Mr Dreilich a horror of war that is shared by millions of Germans, and which makes them inveterate opponents of the invasion of Iraq.
Mr Schröder and Mrs Merkel debate against each other tonight on German television, and he can be expected to accuse her of being an American stooge. He won re-election in 2002 by appealing to German anti-Americanism, and has desperately played the same card this time, but from a position of much greater weakness in the polls.
Mrs Merkel, moreover, will not permit him a monopoly on patriotism. Some of her loudest cheers in Karlsruhe and Potsdam came when she said that unlike the present German government, she would not countenance the admission of Turkey to the European Union.
Her moderation of tone makes her very difficult to attack. She can manage droll humour at will, but she also dares, when the occasion demands it, to be dull. The Germans do not want to be ruled by a wit.
They are fed up with Mr Schröder's shameless attempts to charm himself out of trouble, and are ready to be governed by someone of substance, who dares to tell them the truth. In Mrs Merkel, the awkward-looking daughter of an East German clergyman, they appear to have found just such a person.
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