On 22 December 1999, a letter appeared on the front page of Germany's leading conservative daily, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung [*]. It contained a searing attack on the country's most highly regarded statesman, Helmut Kohl, recently retired chancellor and much-feted architect of reunification. Kohl, then mired in an ugly party funding scandal, had to be cut loose, the letter urged, as teenagers must jettison their parents to grow into adults. The only way forward for his Christian Democrats was a complete break with their past.
It was a remarkable letter, a clinical and very public coup-de-grace delivered to an eminent, mortally wounded elder. What made it more remarkable was that the person who signed it was not one of the obviously thrusting young pretenders to Kohl's CDU throne, but a moon-faced and oddly unmemorable protege [sic] whom he used to refer to, dismissively, as das Mädchen: the girl.
Some like to see in this episode – which duly launched Angela Merkel on the stratospheric trajectory that would see her elected head of the centre-right CDU the following year and Germany's first woman chancellor barely five years after that – proof positive that she is a sharp, maybe even a ruthless opportunist, eminently capable of bold, decisive and, if necessary, dirty deeds to achieve her ends.
Others construe it more as an uncharacteristic moment of madness from a politician who otherwise has constructed an entire career on caution and consensus; a public figure so superficially unremarkable, so singularly lacking in passion or charisma that in nearly 25 years in politics she has (as her biographer puts it) "not made a single speech that stayed in the memory". A moderator, not a leader; a tactician, not a strategist.
She could, of course, be both. But what's becoming increasingly clear, as the euro teeters on the precipice and economic disaster beckons, is that if she is, a great many people – most of them, it has to be said, outside Germany – would actually quite like to see a bit more of the former, and rather less of the latter. A touch more of the bold and decisive, somewhat less of the calm and methodical. If possible.
Merkel is, after all, about the most important person in the world right now. As leader of the eurozone's undisputed economic powerhouse, she in effect holds the future financial wellbeing of all of us in her hands. And the worry is she's not up to the job. For all her undoubted qualities and undimmed domestic popularity (the pollsters, certainly, see no hint of a rival who could threaten her re-election in 2013, for a third successive term), Merkel – a pale, irredeemably frumpy, maddeningly hard-to-pin-down shadow of an Adenauer, a Brandt, a Kohl – is totally not what's needed, say her critics. Read on and comment » | Jon Henley | Tuesday, November 22, 2011
* FOCUS ONLINE: Der Bruch des „Mädchens“ mit Ziehvater Kohl: Inmitten der Spendenaffäre empfahl Angela Merkel vor zehn Jahren der CDU die Abnabelung von Kanzler Helmut Kohl. Durch ihren Gastbeitrag für die „FAZ“ wurde der Alt- und Ehrenvorsitzende zum Geächteten der eigenen Partei. ¶ Angela Merkel hätte die Kernbotschaft ihres kühlen Artikels vom 22. Dezember 1999 für die „Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung“ auch in zwei Worte fassen können: „Tschüß, Kohl“. Stattdessen schmiedete sie aus Vokabeln schlichter Laien-Pädagogik Sätze von ungeheurer Sprengkraft: „Die Partei muss also laufen lernen, muss sich zutrauen, in Zukunft auch ohne ihr altes Schlachtross, wie Helmut Kohl sich selbst gerne genannt hat, den Kampf mit dem politischen Gegner aufzunehmen. Sie muss sich wie jemand in der Pubertät von zu Hause lösen, eigene Wege gehen.“ » | Von FOCUS-Korrespondentin Margarete van Ackeren, Berlin | Dienstag 22. Dezember 2009
