Posted on 10/11/2005 7:30:55 PM PDT by NCjim
Even when she became the leader of the conservatives, few people -- including many within her own party -- took her seriously. All luck, they said. But now, Angela Merkel is set to become Germany's first ever woman chancellor and has left all her political opponents in the dust. How did she do it?
It's the middle of February in 2000 and Angela Merkel has invited her most trusted advisors, office manager Beate Baumann and spokeswoman Eva Christiansen, to a closed door meeting in her office at the Christian Democratic headquarters in Berlin. The mood in the building is grim; the party is in the middle of one of its biggest ever crises as a massive campaign donation scandal gathers steam.
The three women meet for a long time -- and the longer they talk, the more determined they become. The plan they develop is enough to frighten even themselves. They feel a bit like gangsters who are scheming to clean out the safe of the Bank of England -- it's a crazy plan, but they're going to try it anyway.
Their timing is perfect. Former Chancellor Helmut Kohl had just been forced down from the position of the party's honorary chairman a few weeks earlier and CDU leader Wolfgang Schäuble also announces his resignation -- both due to the 100,000 deutsche mark undocumented donation from arms lobbyist Karlheinz Schreiber.
Angela Merkel, who has been CDU general secretary for 15 months at the time, sees her opening. If she plays her cards right, she could takeover as party chief -- and after that, the sky's the limit. In the meeting with her advisors, the idea of her becoming chancellor is broached for the first time. Merkel says she's ready -- she can do it.
Germany's most unusual chancellor
Five and a half years later and Merkel's plan has paid off in spades: She has managed to oust Schröder and she will soon become Germany's next chancellor. After seven years of SPD rule, Merkel will now add onto the 36 years of CDU governance that Germany has had since 1949.
In many ways, Merkel will be the most unusual chancellor Germany has ever had. Not only is the physicist by education the first-ever woman chancellor, but she is also the first head of government to come from former East Germany. She brings with her the experience of growing up under communism. Indeed, there is reason to believe that she will change the country more than most of her predecessors in the chancellery -- perhaps one of the reasons her election night results were so much lower than polls had predicted.
Merkel didn't make it easy for Germans to vote for her, neither from a political perspective nor from a personal point of view. She allowed her opponents to lead the way in forging her public image. And she failed to emphasize her almost heroic climb up the political career ladder: the outsider from the East who managed to rise in the face of myriad obstacles. She surely could have done more with such a biography.
But she never really tried. She isn't one for Hollywood plot lines and when it comes to her private life, she is extremely reserved even to the point of being shy. Indeed, her inability to mold her own public persona has left the door open for others -- particularly detractors from within her own party -- to do it for her. She is, they have said, a cold opportunist who has fought her way to the top with little regard for others and without any sort of emotional connection to her own party.
On Feb. 18, 2000, the first of a total of seven CDU regional conferences takes place in the Lower Saxony town of Wolfenbüttel. Despite the large group that has assembled, it is strangely quiet -- perhaps out of fear. The CDU has never before experienced such a deep-seated crisis. But after Angela Merkel's 15 minute speech, the mood in the hall begins slowly to improve. The audience applauds and seems refreshed by Merkel's unconventional style -- it seems as though a new beginning may just be possible after all.
It was all luck
When conservative CDU parliamentarians mull over Merkel's rise to the top over beers in their favorite Berlin pubs, they often come up with a rather simple explanation. It was luck, they say, that Kohl decided to invite a symbolic East German to join his cabinet in 1990. It was luck that the CDU leadership collapsed as a result of the political donation scandal uncovered in 1999. It was luck that Chancellor Gerhard Schröder called for snap new elections this spring thus forcing the CDU to quickly choose Merkel as its chancellor candidate. It's an easy and comfortable explanation for a meteoric rise that traditional wings of the CDU aren't exactly ecstatic about. But even if Merkel did have her fair share of luck, she has gotten to where she is today primarily through her well-developed instinct for power and her ability to recognize opportunities when they present themselves.
The enthusiasm of the party members at the regional conference in Wolfenbüttel and at the six subsequent regional conferences was enough to sweep away the opposition of the party functionaries -- most of whom likewise had their eyes on taking over the ailing party -- and establish Merkel as the CDU leader. The members' fervor likewise cannot be ascribed to luck; the regional conferences were a new idea, invented by none other than Angela Merkel.
Indeed, this pattern can be recognized in all of the career jumps she made: She was lucky, but she also knew exactly how to maximize her luck. Helmut Kohl had only noticed her in the first place because she had implored a CDU friend of hers to introduce her. As Kohl's minister of the environment, she began to separate herself from her patron Kohl because she sensed he was heading toward an election defeat. She didn't oppose him in public, but internally, she began to distance herself -- she no longer wanted to be Helmut Kohl's creation. Indeed, her increased distance to the party don was one of the reasons that Wolfgang Schäuble, immediately after taking over from Kohl as party head, tapped her as general secretary.
It took a long time for her opponents from within the CDU -- and there are more than a few -- to realize just how dangerous Merkel can be. At first, they only saw her as a hard-working minister -- first with the women and youth portfolio and later as environment minister -- who did solid work without necessarily overshadowing others. Few recognized the ambition that blazed within her.
Pushing Kohl aside
But Merkel's handling of political allies and opponents soon proved that she had learned her lessons well. Those she doesn't need anymore are left behind. Those who prove disruptive are forced out of the way.
On Dec. 22, 1999, Merkel published her now famous article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in which she finally went on the offensive against her political mentor Helmut Kohl. The party, she wrote, has to learn to go "its own way" without the "old war horse" Kohl.
The move was timed brilliantly and then party boss Wolfgang Schäuble was taken completely by surprise. And not without design. Merkel knew that Schäuble had kept the deutsche mark 100,000 donation quiet and that this would eventually come out. The upshot was that both Kohl and Schäuble were toppled from power -- and Merkel climbed yet another rung toward the top.
Her next move came in 2002 when she grabbed leadership of the CDU parliamentary group away from archrival Friedrich Merz after her party barely lost the general elections that year. Last year, she then got her presidential candidate, Horst Köhler, elected -- yet another slap in the face to the CDU party dinosaurs.
She has been so successful in pushing for the top that even her perhaps cleverest antagonist, Hesse governor Roland Koch, has said of Merkel that she "has a distinctive lust for power and the ability to grab and hold on to power." These, of course, are the characteristics most necessary for a chancellor. But her climb has left a not-so-pleasant aftertaste in the mouths of many in her party. The determination with which she shoved her opponents aside is, for them, uncanny. She demands the utmost loyalty, but she has yet to prove that, when the going gets tough, she herself can be loyal.
In April 2004, Merkel traveled to Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. For the last two years, coalition there between the conservatives and the liberals has been governing the country and has made large steps in reforming Slovakia's economy. The labor market has been made more flexible, the pension system radically redesigned, and a flat tax of 19 percent was introduced. At the Volkswagen factory there, some are saying that productivity is higher than it is in Germany.
For Merkel, Slovakia seemed the fulfillment of her reform dreams. "In Germany, people would rather talk about the risks than the opportunities," she sighed during one of her speeches there. Following a talk with the Slovakian minister of finance, Ivan Miklos, she said only half jokingly, "he's even more radical than I am."
Seeing Germany through an eastern lens
Merkel's worldview, of course, has a different origin than most of her party colleagues: Rather than growing up during the "economic miracle" in West Germany, she was getting by in a communist dictatorship. The result is a different point of view on Germany than many of her contemporaries. Which is also one of the reasons that many in western Germany have found it difficult warming up to her.
Her disintegrating apartment in Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood, the view of the Wall, the pathetic technical equipment she was forced to use at the science academy where she worked -- all that made it clear to Merkel that socialism could never work. She didn't experience the East German system as the ultimate safety net, rather as a choking vice grip.
And she has now applied that experience to the Germany she lives in today. Merkel feels that the country's current social system is likewise restrictive -- if not a death grip, then a corset that makes it difficult for the population to breathe. But for most of her fellow party members who grew up in post-war West Germany, the system is part of their political identity. It was something Germans could be proud of at a time when Germans had little cause for pride. There is an emotional chasm between Merkel and the West Germans -- a chasm that was also apparent in the general election results of three weeks ago.
It took a long time for Merkel to come out with her reform ideas. She is a master of the political double entendre -- she will often talk about the "we"-society and is fond of pointing out how the liberal market economy can be socially just. Indeed, for a long time, the left wing of her party -- that part which places great emphasis on the social system -- was among her strongest supporters.
It was only in her Oct. 3, 2003 speech -- held in Berlin's German History Museum on the occasion of the 13th anniversary of reunification -- that she finally provided a clear outline of how she wanted to modernize the country. It was essentially her political coming out -- the years of observation and strategizing were over. Her proposals -- simplifying the tax code and lowering taxes, simplifying health care, and radically overhauling how old-age care insurance was financed -- became party policy just two months later in an almost unanimous vote at a party conference in Leipzig.
The CDU was proud of Merkel and for the first time, she felt as though her party actually liked her. But the euphoria didn't last long; Edmund Stoiber still saw himself in the chancellery waiting room and didn't waste much time in systematically destroying her reform agenda. When the smoke had cleared, all that was left were a few lazy compromises including a gutted tax reform.
Since then, the party has wondered just how far Merkel would go to see her visions become reality. Would she risk her political future for her reform plan as Schröder had done with his Agenda 2010? Who would support her?
The low point
In October 2004, Merkel was in Berlin to drum up support for her healthcare plan. The audience was made up of CDU members from Berlin, where Merkel lives, from Brandenburg, where she grew up, and from Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania where her electoral district is. For the first time in a long time, she was among friends and the applause was loud and long. She didn't interrupt it -- a friendly gesture is exactly what she needed at the time.
The Berlin appearance came during the most difficult days Merkel had experienced during her years as party head. The CDU had lost support in three of the last four state elections and the bitter fight with sister party CSU over competing healthcare plans had reached its high point. Even worse, parliamentary group deputy leader Friedrich Merz had just withdrawn from all leadership positions in the party because he was no longer willing to work with Merkel. Only the governor of Thuringia, Dieter Althaus, and a few women from the parliamentary group are willing to support Merkel. It's the peak of her political solitude and the low point of her political career.
But Merkel learned from the experience. She learned that she is not party head because she inspires hope and fulfils wishes. Rather, her position is thanks to a cynical cost-benefit analysis. She can only survive if getting rid of her is politically more expensive than holding on to her. And since the Sept. 18 general elections, the calculations have been run through once more.
The moment of solitude was painful for Merkel, but since then, she knows who her reliable allies really are. And she knows that there are few state governors she can depend on -- and a few she cannot.
Roland Koch from Hesse, Christian Wulff from Lower Saxony, Günther Oettinger from Stuttgart and Peter Müller from Saarland all belong to the younger generation of CDU politicians who, after the Kohl era ended, had planned to divide power among themselves. Merkel, though, was an unexpected wrench in the works. And Koch, Wulff and others are still in a state of shock. The rise of Merkel is like their version of an industrial accident -- they have a lot to win were she to fail.
Merkel's own support group is small and quickly listed. In addition to her office manager Baumann, spokeswoman Christiansen and the former CDU business manager Willi Hausmann, there are only very few that she completely trusts. They include Norbert Röttgen, deputy parliamentary group leader Ronald Pofalla, general secretary Volker Kauder and Baden Wurttemberg minister of culture, youth and sports Annette Schavan. All of them are now being considered for cabinet posts in Merkel's new government or top posts in a reshuffled CDU.
When Merkel moves into the chancellery in Berlin, the office will surely change her just as it has all previous chancellors. Already, it has begun casting its shadow. Her campaign was a tough one, and there was little time for rest even though she was sick as it got started. "I already have gotten a taste," she said, "as to just how great the pressure will be.
Is Merkel, Geena Davis in disguise???
Um Gottes Willen!
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