Famous and faithful Profile: Angela Merkel
By Sue Careless
UNTIL HER RECENT RETIREMENT as Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, 67, had been generally acknowledged as the de facto leader of the European Union and the most powerful woman in the world.
In December 2015, Merkel was named as Time magazine’s Person of the Year, with the magazine’s cover declaring her to be the “Chancellor of the Free World.” (The chancellor is the head of the German government.) Until this fall, she was the senior G7 leader. And in a 2018 survey she was found to be the most respected world leader internationally.
The leader of the richest and strongest economy in Europe and one of the wealthiest nations in the world, Merkel herself was modest and humble in her private life.
As Doug Saunders reported in the Globe and Mail, “she, unlike both her two predecessors, appeared to be utterly uncorrupted and uncorruptible, supremely ethical and monastically austere in her private life. She refused to move into the official chancellor’s mansion, instead residing with her husband in a small apartment above a pub…for her entire period in office.”
Anything but glamourous with her soup-bowl haircuts, modest dress and plain speaking, Merkel would not be bullied by Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin. (It helped that she spoke English and Russian fluently.) Moreover, unlike them, she did not make her ego part of her political persona.
During her 16-year chancellorship she dealt with four American presidents, five British prime ministers and eight Italian prime ministers. She worked hard to created consensus in her party and in the European Union. As Eric Reguly commented in the Globe and Mail, “Merkel refused to let the European Union be torn apart on her watch.”
Merkel is a woman of deep and genuine Christian faith. In 2012, she said, “I am a member of the evangelical church. I believe in God and religion is also my constant companion, and has been for the whole of my life. We as Christians should above all not be afraid of standing up for our beliefs.” A year earlier she also publicly declared that Germany suffers not from “too much Islam” but “too little Christianity”.
She is a Lutheran member of a United Protestant (that is both Reformed and Lutheran) church body under the umbrella of the Evangelical Church in Germany.
Early life
Angela Dorothea Kasner was born in 1954, in Hamburg, West Germany. Merkel’s father, Horst Kasner, was a Lutheran pastor and theologian who moved to East Germany when his daughter was an infant, just as thousands were fleeing westward.
In his 2016 tribute to Merkel, Nick Spencer wrote in Christianity Today:
“Kasner felt some sympathy with East Germany state socialism (or at least with what it was ostensibly trying to achieve) although that did not preclude his family from intense surveillance from a government that was deeply hostile to faith and freedom.”
Merkel grew up in the countryside 90 km north of East Berlin and lived in a house with a church-run centre for people with mental and physical disabilities.
Merkel has described herself as one quarter Polish. Her mother, Herlind, was born in Danzig, Poland, and was a teacher of English and Latin.
Merkel’s paternal grandfather was originally Catholic but the entire family converted to Lutheranism during the childhood of her father, who later studied Lutheran theology in Heidelberg and Hamburg.
Youth
In 1968, Merkel joined the Free German Youth (FDJ), the official communist youth movement sponsored by the ruling Marxist–Leninist Socialist Unity Party of Germany. Membership was nominally voluntary, but those who did not join found it difficult to gain admission to higher education.
She did not participate in the secular coming of age ceremony Jugendweihe, however, which was common in East Germany. Instead, she was confirmed. During this time, she participated in several compulsory courses on Marxism-Leninism but her grades in these courses were only “sufficient.”
At high school Merkel learned to speak Russian fluently and was awarded prizes for her proficiency in both Russian and mathematics.
Chemist and Physicist
Merkel continued her education at Karl Marx University, Leipzig, where she studied physics for five years. Near the end of her studies, Merkel sought an assistant professorship at an engineering school. As a condition for getting the job, Merkel was told she would need to agree to report on her colleagues to officers of the Ministry for State Security. The Stasi was one of the most effective and repressive intelligence and secret police agencies ever to have existed. Merkel declined, using the excuse that she could not keep secrets well enough to be an effective spy.
Merkel worked and studied at the Academy of Sciences in Berlin-Adlershof from 1978 to 1990. There she became a member of its FDJ secretariat. According to her former colleagues, she openly propagated Marxism as the secretary for “Agitation and Propaganda.” However, Merkel has denied this claim and stated that she was secretary for culture, which involved activities like obtaining theatre tickets and organising talks by visiting Soviet authors. She stated: “I can only rely on my memory, if something turns out to be different, I can live with that.”
She obtained a doctorate in quantum chemistry in 1986 and worked as a research scientist until 1989.
Early political career
The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 served as the catalyst for Merkel’s political career. Although she did not participate in the crowd celebrations the night the wall came down, one month later Merkel became involved in the growing democracy movement, joining the new party Democratic Awakening. She served briefly as deputy spokesperson for the first democratically elected Government of East Germany led by Lothar de Maizière.
Following German reunification in 1990, Merkel was elected to the Bundestag as a member of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), a centre-right party. She was appointed as a minister by Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who recognised her talent but also wanted a Protestant woman from the East to help balance his cabinet of largely Roman Catholic men.
“For all that she might be an outsider to her party, Merkel spoke its language,” wrote Spenser. “The CDU openly talks of the Christian ethic, and in particular the Christian valuing of humanity made in the image of God, as its foundation for politics.”
Merkel became party leader in 2000 and following the 2005 federal election, she was appointed to succeed Gerhard Schröder as Chancellor of Germany.
Chancellor & crisis manager
Merkel became the first female German chancellor, the first to have grown up in the former East Germany and the youngest German chancellor since the Second World War. She was also the first chancellor with a background in science.
Many East Germans felt like orphans after the WWII. Merkel gave them a sense of security. Eventually Merkel acquired the nickname “Mutti” (a German familiar form of “mother”). She was a great negotiator and could balance conservative ideas with those of social justice. Political stability came with Merkel’s longevity.
Under Merkel, national and household wealth grew. When she became chancellor the unemployment rate was 11 per cent and Germany was known as “the sick man of Europe.” Today the jobless rate is half that.
In 2011, following Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster, Merkel’s government said that Germany’s 17 nuclear power stations would be shut down by 2022. Germany has the highest carbon emissions in Europe but Merkel’s Energiewende program has focused on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and increasing renewable energy sources. The results have been mixed: Germany has spent billions on wind and solar power, but is still heavily reliant on coal—and electricity prices are among the highest in Europe.
In foreign policy, Merkel emphasised international cooperation in both the EU and NATO, and strengthening transatlantic economic relations. Canadians can thank Merkel for helping pass the Canada-EU Comprehensive Economic and Trade agreement.
Most of all Merkel was a great crisis manager and several huge crises confronted her and the world during her 16-year chancellorship.
Merkel played a crucial role in managing the global financial crisis or Great Recession of 2007–2009 and the European debt crisis of 2010. She was widely credited with helping save the euro – but only barely. Ireland, Spain and Italy were experiencing terrible debt emergences and Greece was nearly bankrupt.
Merkel accepted several invitations to speak at the International Meeting of Prayer for Peace and asked for the meeting’s prayers during the Euro crisis.
Then in 2014 when Russia invaded Ukraine and seized Crimea, Merkel, fluent in Russian, negotiated peace talks with Putin. For its own economic reasons, however, Germany resisted a full confrontation with Moscow.
2015 Migrant crisis
Merkel will best be remembered for opening the doors to 1.3 million Syrian, Afghan and Iraqi refugees, while other European nations were slamming their doors shut. The chancellor saw them as “victims to be rescued rather than invaders to be repelled.” It was probably the most contentious decision of her career. The European Union was aghast. Some wondered if the pragmatic leader was going soft and sentimental. Her own political party nearly split over her decision. Her popularity plummeted and far-right parties emerged. But she declared “Wir schaffen das,” that is, “We can do it.”
Again, quoting Nick Spencer writing in Christianity Today:
“Perhaps most tellingly, in the increasingly tense debate over Islam in Germany, Merkel has not circumvented the thorny issue of religion. While analysts feel that her extraordinarily generous (others have said foolhardy, or criminally negligent) response to the refugee crisis was due more to her East German upbringing, fostering a deep sense for the importance of free movement, rather than her Christian one, she has still articulated a moral angle to the problem. ‘If we have to start apologising for showing a friendly face in response to emergency situations, then that’s not my country’. Moreover, she has argued that the proper response to Muslim migration is not some mythically-neutral secularism, still less the kind of Islamophobia increasingly evident in sections of German society, but a securer grasp of Christian faith, declaring that Germany suffers not from ‘too much Islam’ but ‘too little Christianity.’”
Today more than half those asylum seekers have jobs and pay taxes – and thousands are studying or training for new careers.
Yet the influx has not been without challenges for German society and, in recent years, Germany has toughened its immigration and asylum policies to curb the influx of migrants by including right to deport failed asylum seekers and limiting the number of family reunion visas. Germany also plans to cut refugee funding by one third from 2020. This means that securing asylum in Germany will become even more difficult.
As a result of rising anti-immigration attitudes (2016 saw more than 900 hate crimes on refugee homes especially in eastern areas of Germany) and tough immigration policies, many refugees and asylum seekers are heading back home voluntarily. Between 2013 and 2017, Germany facilitated the return of over 140,000 migrants to their country of origin or a third country.
Spencer also noted that Merkel “spoke at the German Evangelical Church’s annual synod urging Germany’s Protestant and Roman Catholic churches to stress their common beliefs in the challenging run up to the 2017 Reformation anniversary.”
In June 2017 Merkel allowed an open vote in the Bundestag on of the legalization of same-sex marriage. She herself voted against the bill but it passed.
With her background in chemistry, Merkel was able to handle the deadly COVID pandemic that began in 2019 by voicing scientific competence, and quickly defeating the deniers. Referring to the pandemic restrictions of the past 18 months, the chancellor said in one of her last speeches that it had been “incredibly difficult” to temporarily curb personal liberties 30 years after reunification.
“To view something as politically necessary and at the same time an unbearable imposition on democracy is something I consider to be among the hardest experiences during my time as chancellor.”
Conclusion
Time Magazine calls Merkel “a thoughtful, flexible problem-solver” who “helped save the European Union. That’s an accomplishment that deserves lasting respect.”
In his biography Angela Merkel: The Chancellor and Her Time Ralph Bollmann writes, “Angela Merkel played an important role in stabilizing liberal democracy in times of crisis.”
Merkel had stepped down from leading her party before it placed second in the September election. She leaves politics with an incredible 80 percent approval rating, and a teddy bear created to resemble her is selling out fast.
In her farewell speech she said, “I wasn’t born as chancellor or as party leader. I have always wanted to do my government and party jobs with dignity, and one day leave them with dignity. In this moment I am overwhelmed by one single feeling – thankfulness.”
Spencer concludes, “For all her privacy, pragmatism and hesitation, Merkel shows glimpses of principled steel that are connected to her private, but sincere Christian faith.” -Various sources including Wikipedia, Christianity Today, Globe and Mail, Daily Telegraph, Time, and BBC.
