Angela Merkel, during her long term, has known four French presidents, Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy, François Hollande and Emmanuel Macron. She came on her last official visit to Paris, during her farewell tour, on September 16.
Daughter of a pastor father and a teacher mother, Angela Dorothea Merkel was born on July 17, 1954, in Hamburg. His father was later named in East Germany, in Brandenburg. Thus the future chancellor will spend her childhood and her youth in the German Democratic Republic, with the path of all young East Germans, communist youth movements, and the Party line obliges.
A student in physics at the University of Leipzig, she obtained her doctorate in 1986, then was employed at the Institute of Physics and Chemistry of the Academy of Sciences of the GDR, until 1990. It was in this same year that ‘she will enter the political bureau of the opposition movement to communism, the Democratic Renewal (Demokratischer Aufbruch) and will become the deputy spokesperson of the last government of the GDR, but the first democratically elected after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Also in 1990, after reunification, Angela Merkel jumped the ford by joining the CDU, the Christian Democratic Party of West Germany, that of the then chancellor, Helmut Kohl. Dazzling and surprising rise, Angela Merkel will become Federal Minister for Women and Youth, from 1991 to 1994, then Minister of the Environment, Nature Protection and Nuclear Safety, from 1994 to 1998, physicist obliges.
Finally eight years later after “her passage to the West”, she will be the first woman elected at the head of the CDU in 1998. She will have to wait another seven years to succeed the Social Democrat, Gerhard Schröder, at the head. of the Chancellery with, for 16 years, an ability to govern with different coalitions. Surprising course, even unique in Germany, also for other EU member states.
It must be said that Angela Merkel will have had the chance to benefit from a very good economic situation in Germany, and a talent, by making it prosper, by protecting it at all costs, which was her leitmotif in all negotiations with the states. members of the EU for 16 long years.
It was during the re-election of his fourth term, on September 24, 2017, that the question was asked not long ago. It had opened its borders without any sovereign control during the migration crisis of 2015 and 2016, welcoming a million refugees; this humanitarian action came from the daughter of a pastor, who saw it as a historic opportunity to drive out the demons of the Third Reich, but also opened the door to the nationalist and eurosceptic AfD party, which would lead its way from regional parliaments to the federal parliament.
Last “touch” to the questions, the wait for the formation of a federal coalition government between the Christian Democrats of the CDU-CSU and the Social Democrats of the SPD in February 2018, a six-month wait. Following this re-election, the question of the excess mandate could be confirmed in the sense that, when he left the head of the CDU, after 18 years in November 2018, the one who will succeed him on December 7, 2018, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer , will give up his chair three years later, on January 16, 2021 to the faithful “Merkelien” Armin Laschet.
Taking office in 2005, the Chancellor had no respite from her European governance, which forced her to take positions that were sometimes contradictory with what was hoped for from her “Europeanism”.
2005 was the year of the French and Dutch “No”, as regards the draft European Constitutional Treaty in 2005, and it was in 2007 that the EU, under German presidency, set up the Intergovernmental Conference which was to succeed, still in operation. 2007, at the signing of the Lisbon Treaty, under the Portuguese presidency. Here, Angela Merkel had just made her presence felt in European politics.
Then, from the economic and financial shock of 2008 which hit the EU hard, Angela Merkel is positioning herself for budgetary rigor, which will not prevent her from being in favor of a European plan to rescue banks, understands who can . Because the Chancellor praising budgetary rigor, but also the rescue of banks, has turned her back on Greece. During the Greek crisis, both the Chancellor and the European Troika, will be intractable with Greece, creating in fact a laboratory of economic eugenics for the Greeks, which the IMF will not oppose.
After the financial and economic crisis of 2010, 2015 will see the migration crisis (mentioned above), and in 2016 Angela Merkel will be the privileged interlocutor of Turkish President Erdoğan. A treaty between Turkey and the EU will follow, with six billion euros in aid to Turkey, which Angela Merkel will very often be criticized for.
Then in 2020 will come the Covid-19 crisis, a new crisis for Angela before her departure. As for her international, bilateral and multilateral policy, if it is obvious that the Chancellor has always placed herself under the umbrella of Washington’s big brother, she has also maneuvered very well with Moscow, sharing with the Russian leaders a common origin in the understanding of case management from the Comecon era, and above all the great advantage of being fluent in Russian.
With the departure of the one who was the “good mother of a family” who knew how to manage and preserve the budget, the doubt is now in the minds of the Germans. So attached to savings, and far from financial adventurism, minds are still and always marked by the crisis of 1929, and therefore the fear of inflation which had brought the Nazis to power. In people’s minds is the anguish of the unscrewing German model.
From the energy transition to the supply crisis generated by the Covid-19 crisis, not to mention the accident at the Suez Canal, little by little doubt is taking the place of insurance in people’s minds. It must be said that the Chancellor has defended tooth and nail the prosperity of her country, even if it has more poor people than in France, as our guest the journalist Kai Littman, founder of eurojournalist.eu clarified.
But what Angela did not do, her successors will have to tackle it, the modernization of private and public infrastructure, such as highways or railways, among others. Here, the site is huge and will weigh heavily on the German budget. If during the 2010 crisis, the German government tried to convince the Germans to spend, as the amount of savings was high, today despite savings still prosperous, and foreign trade which is doing very well, it is the word debt that haunts homes across the Rhine. Because debt is a taboo word in Germany.
So, mandate too many or not, during these 16 years in power, Angela Merkel will have left no one indifferent.