Angela Merkel

From RationalWiki
Jump to: navigation, search
Merkel
Warning icon orange.svg This page contains too many unsourced statements, and needs to be improved.

Angela Merkel could use some help. Please research the article's assertions. Whatever is credible should be sourced, and what is not should be removed.

Angela Dorothea Merkel (born 17 July 1954, maiden name Angela Dorothea Kasner) is the Chancellor of Germany and Chairwoman of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Merkel is the first female Chancellor of Germany. She was elected to head to great coalition government between the conservative CDU and formerly(!) center-left Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) from 2005 to 2009. In 2009 the CDU and its favourite political ally, the Free Democratic Party (FDP), got a majority share of votes to form a right-wing coalition government. In 2013, she was elected Chancellor for the third time, now in a coalition with the SPD again.

Contents

[edit] Beginnings & education

Born to a practicing protestant household in the state-socialist German Democratic Republic, a.k.a. East Germany until 1990, Merkel in her student days joined the youth organisation, FDJ, of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) that excercised Soviet-style totalitarian rule over the GDR. She rose to the position of member of the FDJ district board and secretary for agitprop (agitation & propaganda), a fact she countered by claiming she had only been secretary for culture. She studied physics at the Universities of Leipzig, Berlin and Moscow, earning a PhD and authoring several scientific papers on physical chemistry.

[edit] German unification & quick rise to top party ranks

She joined the democratic movement after the state party SED lost its grip in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and worked in the East German pre-unification government that administrated the absorption of the GDR into the Federal Republic of Germany, then known as West Germany. To the surprise of many of her friends at the time she joined the politically conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU). According to her biographer, Gerd Langguth, most of the people in her circle assumed - based on her actual views at the time - she would join the Green Party. German Chancellor Helmut Kohl appointed her to Minister for the Women's Affairs and later for the Environment and Nuclear Safety pretty much out of the blue since she was not yet a well-known face to the German public. Chancellor Kohl famously dubbed her "my girl" signalling he would take her under his wings and offer her political tutorship in exchange for loyalty.

After a landslide defeat at the polls in 1998 the CDU became the opposition party and although they were able to snatch a couple of state governorships out of the hands of the ruling Social Democrats (SPD) in 1999, many felt the party needed a change in course to substantially challenge the progressive agenda of the Social Democratic-Green Party coalition. However, that programmatic update was deemed impossible with the old guard, Helmut Kohl and his right-hand man and no.1 protege Wolfgang Schäuble, still in charge of the party. All that changed quickly when said old guard became embroiled in a massive party financing fraud scandal that led to Parliamentary investigations and public fallouts between high-ranking party veterans. Angela Merkel saw her window of opportunity and demanded the culprits exit the party leadership and disclose all secret donors and transactions to prevent further damage from the party. This PR tour de force was seen by Helmut Kohl as a stab in the back since he valued loyalty and unity highly. Merkel became party chairwoman with the promise of remaking the CDU to a modern and compassionate conservative voice for the 21 century.


[edit] The road to the top is paved with the bodies of rivals

Merkel's intuition for the general demand of the public to rid the CDU of corruption and opacity garnered her esteem among the populace.

Still, being a female and a protestant from the former state-socialist East Germany Merkel had to overcome very real predujices in the male-dominated, staunchly anti-communist Christian Democratic Union that has its strongest roots in the deep-Catholic South and Southwest of Germany. Particularly, the Bavarian prime minister Edmund Stoiber and the opposition leader Friedrich Merz — both with deep ties to big business — positioned themselves as battle-hardened professionals who could defeat the Social Democratic-Green coalition of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder with their trickle-down-economics expertise. Stoiber convinced the party establishment that it was his time and not the newcomer Merkel's so he became their nominee. Bad economic numbers and a nearly inexplicable political turn to the right almost cost Chancellor Schröder the 2002 election but he was able to shore up his disentchanted base by casting Stoiber as a reactionary plutocrat and vassal of the Bush43 administration.

After a narrow loss Stoiber and Merz fell from grace. Merkel used the time in the run-up to and the aftermath of the election to dissipate her remaining disadvantage: intra-party connectivity. Starting out almost as an outcast she has spun a web of supporters by awarding loyal partisans for her cause with high-ranking positions and stacking the party leadership with women. The campaign to change the party's image from being a country-club of silver-haired and cold-blooded ideologues to a media-savvy party of the middle-class proved successful in the snap election of 2005.

By eroding worker's rights and Germany's welfare state SPD-leader Schröder lost the support of his core constituencies and thus lost the election against the CDU, which ran on cutting the welfare state and worker's rights in the name of economic competitiveness even further, albeit by a narrow margin. Having pushed aside political titans like former Chancellors Kohl and Schröder, prime minister Stoiber and former opposition leader Merz and party secretary Laurenz Meyer, Angela Merkel finally claimed the chancellorship for herself and formed a Great Coalition government between her CDU the main rival SPD.

[edit] The Great Coalition government: Even more bodies...

Merkel's finetuned control of her public image and the unwillingness of the former worker's party SPD to change their neoliberal economic strategy proved ultimately deadly for her opponents. The great coalition government proceeded to dismantle the public benefit system at an increasing speed and workers as well as middle-income people felt the pressure that was mounting on them from years of wage deflation. But Merkel was smart enough to take credit for the improving jobs numbers while pinning the Social Democrats with the label of betrayal to the social contract.

Neoliberals in the SPD like Peer Steinbrück and Franz Müntefering responded to the erosion in voter trust with deregulation of the financial and corporate sector with the intent to win back the middle class.

That proved to be a disastrous decision as those actions invited the 2007-8 financial crisis to hit home. Germany was not hit as hard by the economic fallout that followed the credit crunch, something that Angela Merkel was able to pin on her lapel as an achievement while the Social Democrats were busy explaining to the public why they didn't build enough safeguards to protect the people from their economic woes. Yet during that time the public's trust in their elected officials waned and Merkel had to withstand some heavy inner-party opposition from influential state prime ministers like Roland Koch, Günther Oettinger, Peter Müller and Christian Wulff due to sliding poll numbers and a perception of incompetent crisis management. Conservative hardliners demanded she edge out the party's conservative profile (i.e. even more corporate welfare and more emphasis on social conservatism) to distance the CDU more from the now center-right SPD.

Merkel sensed she may not overextend the public's acceptance of bank bailouts and wage cuts since that could well cost her the long-cultivated image as a compassionate conservative of the middle ranks of society. Instead she reverted to an established strategy: let the hardliners and intra-coalition hotheads trade jabs and mean sound-bites for a week or two, wait for political opponents across the aisle and pundits to increase the noise level, then wait for a consensus to arrive and declare that you have held that exact position all along and end the debate with a plea to focus on the next important issue, not on theatre. In the public eye you appear as the judicious moderator who is above the childish blame game of politics. In the meanwhile prepare the exit of your rivals by offering them cabinet-level positions to keep them at arms length or prestigious but ultimately uninfluential positions in the political exile.

This way Merkel got rid of the entire SPD and a whole lot of conservative enemies like Wulff, Oettinger, Müller, Schäuble and Koch.

[edit] A hard right turn, into the brickwall?

With the 2009 elections Merkel was at the pinnacle of her career. She was able to ditch the SPD which suffered a historic defeat and form a coalition government with her preferred political ally, the Free Democratic Party (FDP). Domestically, she had free rein to voucherise more public services, give tax breaks to politically allied business sectors, delay the nuclear power phase-out and embrace the far-right by criticising the german concept of multiculturalism. As the troubles of the financial crisis swept around the globe Merkel increased her influence on policy-making in the world, especially in the European Union. But the initial spark of confidence got lost as reality caught up with her: The bank bailouts proved disastrous for the national budgets of other EU-members and for the whole currency area, the nuclear meltdown in Fukushima increased the world's fear of radioactivity and germans got bugged by Merkel's biding and insecure approach to imminent problems. The CDU lost a couple of important state houses and governorships in 2010 and 2011. But since the opposition lies in shambles - pre-occupied more with in-fighting than with presenting real policy alternatives - or is weeded out of existence with respect to Merkel's own party and she is able to frame the Euro crisis as a failure of budgetary discipline on behalf of lazy Southern Europeans without challenge from the opposition or a largely subserviant media apparatus, the population cannot turn to an alternative and more or less approves of Merkel's stewardship of her 2nd term.

It remains to be seen whether a break-down of the Euro currency will come anytime soon and what the exact ramifications will be. Merkel tied her own political future to the success of the austerity measures that plague the European periphery but were instated with the promise of reining in budget deficits for the sake of the stability of the common currency. Prominent economists foresee that cutting back public investment in times of demand-side crises is self-defeating and will actually accelerate the undoing of the European project.

[edit] The elections of 2013

In 2013 Merkel was elected again, but her favorite party, the FDP, was thrown out of the German parliament. So Merkel created a coalition with the SPD.

[edit] External links

Personal tools
Namespaces

Variants
Actions
Navigation
Community
Tools
support