Angela Merkel is riding high. As she returns from holiday to hit the campaign trail for the German elections – making a swing today through the south-east – she is not only her country’s most popular leader for a generation, but arguably the most respected politician in the world. How has this unflashy East German scientist – who disdains glitz and glamour to the point that when she wears a new dress in public it draws comment – succeeded in scaling the heights of international politics?
There is a mystery about Mrs Merkel: she succeeds by being a woman seemingly without mystery. Unlike the Iron Lady, she rarely uses her feminine qualities to beguile men or impress women. Her natural habitat is not the public platform; she doesn’t tweet or text about anything and everything in the news. Intensely private, she comes across as unpretentious and incorruptible. That is why Silvio Berlusconi, as vain as Mrs Merkel is modest, did not know what to do when they clashed, except to whisper sexist obscenities behind her back.
Next month, on September 22, Germany goes to the polls in what has become virtually a referendum on Mrs Merkel – and she is on course to win a third term of office. Her Christian Democrats are polling at around 40 per cent, twice as much as the Social Democrat opposition. It should be enough to win by a landslide, but under Germany’s proportional representation system, she will still need a coalition partner. The Free Democrats, her present allies, are struggling to cross the 5 per cent threshold to stay in parliament, but Christian Democrats will probably use their second preference votes to keep them in government. Read on and comment » | Sunday, August 18, 2013
