The trained physicist and former environment minister no longer believed in nuclear power as a safe source of energy. The enormity of the challenge was completely underestimated.
In Merkel put Peter Altmaier, one of her highly trusted colleagues, in charge to make the Energiewende happen. Days after Fukushima, Merkel was confronted with a major geo-strategic decision: Libya. Should Germany support a United Nations Security Council resolution calling for a no-flight zone over Libya and authorizing military support for the protection of Libyan civilians? It coincided with a diplomatic coup for Berlin.
After an intense lobbying effort, Germany had taken one of the temporary seats on the UN Security Council. But that did not stop Merkel from abstaining from the no-fly zone. At the time, some commentators said it was then-FDP foreign minister Guido Westerwelle who persuaded her to abstain.
At the end of the day, however, it was Merkel who made the decision. It is hard to believe that she did not consider the fall-out, since Russia and China also abstained. Merkel took a lot of criticism for her decision — from the Americans, from her own party, from the opposition Social Democrats, and from some of her European allies, as if they had all rushed to join the NATO mission whose mandate was stretched, to say the least; R2P — the responsibility to protect — mutated into regime change, something Putin has not forgotten that.
What drove Merkel to make this decision? Opportunism the mood in Germany was ambiguous on Libya? A sense that the NATO mission was not going to succeed? She only had to look at how the US coalition failed to follow up their invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan with a systematic state-building effort, one thing that the EU and the US are very, very bad at doing. The only two successful examples are Germany and Japan after Each of these crises was a great opportunity for the EU to demonstrate its ability to respond.
It failed to do so. It was instead left up to Merkel. The European Commission should have been the institution that led these reforms.
But Berlin had little confidence in Brussels to do just that. Ireland has proved otherwise. This saga is far from over. The EU would have failed to deliver on imposing sanctions on Russia had it not been for Merkel. Recall that several of the member states believed that Germany was the weak link in pushing for sanctions because of its very close political, economic, and personal ties with Russian elites, particularly Putin and his circle.
Merkel proved them wrong. It was she who ignored suggestions from those German diplomats who still belong to the Ostpolitik school that it would be better to have Russia invited to the G8 meetings instead excluded as she preferred. Merkel stood her ground. Merkel had her own views: canceling the G8 meeting in Sochi would hurt Russian pride. But Merkel has stuck to her policy: no lifting of sanctions until the Minsk II agreement is fully implemented.
Because the EU has been so abysmal at anticipating crises — worse, at allowing them to deepen — it has fallen to Merkel to prevent the implosion of the EU.
That is what is at stake. Dream on, Horst! Merkel can survive without the CSU. The Social Democrats are not going to jump ship. And whatever the commentators say, the Merkel era is not over. There was no strategy in place. Germany was not prepared for such an influx, and had no answer to the question of how so many tens of thousands could be integrated. Once again, the German chancellor did not inform her EU partners. It was as unilateral a decision as her phasing out nuclear power.
Merkel frequently flees the pressure cooker of Berlin for Templin, just 80 kilometres 50 miles to the north, at the weekends with her chemist husband Joachim Sauer.
When she goes shopping, you hardly notice her, she's practically incognito," said year-old pensioner Bernd Retter, who said he attended the same school as the future German leader. A gifted student, she excelled in maths and Russian, passed her leaving exams with top marks and went on to study physics in Leipzig before entering politics.
Mayor Detlef Tabbert, a member of the far-left Die Linke party, is unabashedly proud of Templin's link to the world's most powerful woman, praising in particular her crisis-fighting abilities. The content you requested does not exist or is not available anymore. ON TV. On social media. Who are we?
Fight the Fake. Indeed, there is a lot of praise for her potato soup, her beef loaf and especially her plum cake. The cake soon became a measure of how much time she was able to afford her private life and her husband. He loved the cake, she really didn't.
As a junior minister under Helmut Kohl, she was still able to have two or three baking weekends each plum season. The plum cake stories trickled away when she became chancellor. Now there are the occasional pictures of the most powerful woman in Europe queuing at the cashier at her neighbourhood grocer. The shopping list is eagerly investigated, but butcher and the fishmonger keep stumm. Merkel and Vladimir Putin go back further than you might think.
Perhaps the rivalry has its roots in the dark shadows of the cold war. Merkel, the greatest benefactor of the revolution, got a taste of his intimidatory tactics very early. When she visited the Kremlin for the first time as chancellor, Putin gave her a plush toy dog as a gift. Merkel became deeply afraid of dogs after she was bitten in the mid 90s. But Putin didn't stop there. The next meeting, at his summer residence on the Black Sea, he let in his black Labrador Kony, an intimidating species.
Merkel sat frozen, and pictures show Putin with a sardonic grin on his face, legs widely stretched. After a meeting with Merkel, a prime minister from a small south-eastern European country told the stunned media, that the chancellor sees similarities between the EU and the ancient Inca. The European value system too could suddenly disappear without trace. Merkel sometimes uses the Inca story to shock, although nobody expects to see tourists climbing the savaged ruins of Brussels in the near future.
But the chancellor does indeed worry about the strength of the western system. Democracy, liberal market-economies, the western legal system are battling the modern version of the cold war against authoritarian, non-democratic but economically strong systems.
Merkel has seen a state collapsing in her lifetime, and she wants to spare her beloved west the same fate. That's the reason for her call to competitiveness and recovery in Europe — and she's afraid that Europe doesn't get it. David Cameron sees himself as a close ally of Merkel.
But the feeling might not be reciprocated. Cameron wouldn't be the first male politician to misread the chancellor — a dangerous mistake. Merkel's path is marked with the corpses of those males getting her wrong.
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