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Angela Merkel has been in the top job for almost 16 years, but the biggest challenge of her career could still be ahead of them.
The Chancellor is fighting the clock to defeat the coronavirus before stepping down in September. She has a lot against her.
Germany is fighting to contain the latest pandemic wave. The increase in infections is being driven by the new, more contagious variant of the virus, which was first identified in Great Britain and became dominant in Germany at the beginning of March.
The influential German Interdisciplinary Society for Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine has warned that most intensive care units in the country are at full or almost full.
On Monday, the number of Germans lost to the virus exceeded 80,000.
As the UK pushes ahead with its reopening plan and the US looks forward to a summer of freedom, Germany faces another tough lockdown – and Germans wonder how it all went so wrong.
Kai Arzheimer, political scientist at the University of Mainz, said the country was a victim of its own success.
“Germany’s first reaction was decisive, successful and scientifically sound,” he told CNN.
The country – and Merkel in particular – has received praise for handling the first wave of the pandemic. As the virus steamed through Europe, Germany kept the epidemic under control. His hospitals were even able to accept Covid-19 patients from neighboring France.
“This early success led to a certain degree of complacency,†said Arzheimer. “Politicians were very reluctant to reintroduce lockdown measures.”
Merkel fought against this reluctance, her data-driven approach collides with the political realities on the ground. It has repeatedly failed to convince the heads of state and government of the 16 German federal states that further restrictions are necessary to contain the epidemic.
While Merkel heads the federal government, the state ministers are responsible for implementing the lockdown measures.
The most embarrassing moment for Merkel came at the end of March when she was forced to completely reverse a strict lockdown that she wanted to impose on the country over the Easter holidays.
She said the lockdown was necessary because of the rapid spread of the new strains of the virus. A day later and after a lot of criticism, she revised the decision on the grounds that it could not be implemented. She asked the nation for forgiveness and said the confusion was “entirely my fault.”
“Chancellor Merkel is a scientist and she knows that scientists only know what they know at the moment, they can say, ‘At the moment we can say one and one are two, but we don’t know whether one and one will be one tomorrow, too be two, so we have to be careful, ‘â€says Gero Neugebauer, political scientist at the Free University of Berlin.
“So at the national level it gives a direction to the countries and the population and says we will do this and that, but we rely on the results of the scientific process.”
Neugebauer said this approach had not been replicated at the state level, where politicians felt more compelled to meet popular expectations.
Crucially, many of the regional leaders have been or are about to have elections – and they are aware of the fact that after a year of living through a pandemic, voters do not want any further restrictions.
“People are fed up with it and the politicians know it,” said Wolfgang Merkel (without reference to the Chancellor), Professor of Political Science at Berlin’s Humboldt University.
“They did not try to implement the measures proposed by scientists and epidemiologists because they feared it would deplete people’s patience.”
Two federal states, Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate, held their regional elections in March. In both cases Merkel’s party suffered great losses. Four other federal states – Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia and Berlin – will hold state elections in the next six months, with the federal election in September.
The resistance at the state level has shaken Merkel. The long-time Chancellor has always favored consensus building and leadership from the center, which this time didn’t work.
“Germany’s political system is decentralized and has many veto points, so the reaction to the second wave after the first uniform reaction was much more cautious and frayed,” said Arzheimer.
In view of a growing crisis, Merkel presented a new emergency law last week that gives the federal government more powers to impose restrictions.
Under the bill, which has yet to be passed by parliament, nationwide lockdown measures would automatically tighten if the seven-day coronavirus incidence rate rises above 100 per 100,000 people.
Neugebauer said it was Merkel’s mistake to wait until now to make the change.
“This process could have taken place last autumn. Instead, they talked about hospitals, about numbers, about the dying, but they didn’t make any decisions, â€he said.
Chancellor Angela Merkel speaks to delegates from her party, the CDU, in February 2018.
When asked to comment on the criticism of the government’s handling of the crisis, a German government spokeswoman referred to Merkel’s statements in the Bundestag on Friday, where she advocated the change in the law.
“We have to slow the third wave of the pandemic and end the rapid increase in new cases. In order to finally achieve this, we have to bundle the forces of the federal, state and local governments better than in the recent past, â€said the Chancellor in the Bundestag.
“We cannot ignore the emergency calls, we cannot leave the doctors and nurses alone, because even with the best medical skills and self-sacrificing efforts they cannot defeat the virus on their own,” she said.
Save your legacy
Merkel has repeatedly told Germans that she hopes that the worst will be over by her resignation in autumn.
She has also promised that everyone will be offered at least one shot of the Covid-19 vaccine by September, a promise that has taken a huge blow due to supply issues.
“If you ask me what went wrong, there was certainly a trigger, and it was the failure of the European Union to procure a vaccine effectively and quickly … that was a turning point in Germany, it made politicians in Germany nervous,” said Wolfgang Merkel.
He said the EU was not alone in guilt. “Germany held the presidency of the Council of the European Union, they had representatives there who sat on the commission,†he said.
Merkel has already admitted errors in the speed of the vaccine introduction, but expects that by the end of June 50 million Germans will receive at least one dose of the vaccine.
Whatever happens over the next five months will, in large part, determine Merkel’s future legacy.
“Merkel’s personal ratings are still relatively high, but obviously the Federal Government’s reputation has suffered a slump and confidence in Germany’s response to the pandemic has fallen,” said Arzheimer.
A protracted health emergency is not what Merkel wants to end her term of office – even if a large part of the blame lies with the prime ministers of the federal states.
As a four-year-old chancellor, Merkel is often compared to two other long-standing post-war leaders, Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Kohl. Wolfgang Merkel said the past two years have shown the weakness of the German system, which allows chancellors to serve indefinitely.
“She would have looked a lot better in the history books if she hadn’t served her final term,” he said, adding that history repeats itself. “It’s lost time … we have seen that in the last two years with Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Kohl, who also ruled for 16 years, and in the last two years he had no power to influence politics.”
Neugebauer added that Merkel’s future legacy is much less clearly defined than that of Adenauer or Kohl. The first was the chancellor of the “integration into the West”, who led Germany back into the European power structures, the second the “reunification chancellor”.
“For Chancellor Merkel it was said that she could become ‘European Integration Chancellor’ and then she should become ‘Humanity Chancellor’ when she said ‘Refugees are welcome’ and now she has the chance to become ‘Chancellor’ who has defeated the pandemic ‘” said Neugebauer.
“The danger, of course, is that the pandemic will still be there after September,” he added.
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