The Twilight of Angela Merkel

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/25/opinion/merkel-election-germany-populism.html

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BERLIN — So begins the twilight of Angela Merkel: with a victory, but a bitter one that also brought the breakthrough into the German Parliament of a rightist, nationalist party that vowed to “hunt” her down.

The enduring image of an election that saw Merkel win a fourth term as chancellor will not be her drawn face during the televised post-vote debate. It will be an exultant Alexander Gauland, a leading politician of the extremist Alternative for Germany (or AfD) party, vowing to “take back our country and our Volk!”

“No experiments” has been the watchword of postwar Germany. Europe’s largest and most powerful nation is still stable. But this election represents a watershed.

The arrival in Parliament, for the first time in decades, of about 94 members of a party that flirts with neo-Nazism, expresses pride in the Wehrmacht soldiers of World War II, and hails once more the German Volk constitutes a shattering of the accepted political contours of the Republic. There will be a before and an after.

Germany will be angrier and more turbulent. Taboos have fallen. The forces taking down mainstream parties in Western democracies are well known by now. They are fear of the future, of immigrants, of Islam and of terrorism; and anger at impunity, inequality and the arrogance of a globalized elite. Germany was not immune to them.

Its lurch came at a time when a race-baiting American president, Donald Trump, has opened the way for everyone’s inner bigot and shown contempt for that most carefully nurtured and prodigious postwar child: the German-American alliance.

The AfD is not the creation of Trump, but when an American president can’t quite find unequivocal words of condemnation for neo-Nazis, the ground shifts in the free world. Plenty of damage can be done short of nuclear winter. Gauland wants the Volk back from what he sees as immigrant pollution; Trump a white-dominated America.

From 1998 to 2001, I lived in a Germany still on the zigzag path out of historical shame, confronting the Nazi past with the return of the capital to Berlin. It agonized. Debate raged over whether Germany might ever have the right to express pride. A more immodest, perhaps a more normal, certainly a more nationalist Germany has now emerged. Enough Germans are done with those dozen Nazi years to send apologists for the army of the Third Reich back to the Reichstag building.

Merkel, during this campaign, went sleepwalking into the whirlwind, with scarcely a new idea. She was her reassuring, ordinary, astute, boring self, “Mutti” with a sharp knife for rivals when needed. That was her message. It was just about enough.

To win a fourth term is extraordinary. She is already a giant, along with her predecessors Adenauer, Brandt, Schmidt and Kohl. Under her, the country has been ushered to a degree of stability, prosperity and unity — and to a plausible claim of liberal democratic moral leadership — that were long unthinkable. German social democracy has performed. It has also frayed. To everything there is an ending; Merkel’s has begun.

Her center-right Christian Democratic party (with its Bavarian sister, the Christian Social Union) plunged to 33 percent of the vote from 41.5 percent in 2013. The center-left Social Democratic Party had just 20.8 percent, a postwar low. Even in a country with minimal unemployment, large surpluses and steady growth, anger at the mainstream consensus was evident.

Still, Merkel won. She won after her brave decision in 2015 to let in one million refugees, many from Syria — a move that gave the AfD ammunition (as well as other anti-immigrant European movements) but will cement her stature over time.

Germany knows what closed doors can mean to the persecuted; Merkel, raised in East Germany, knew it with a particular conviction and so brought Europe back from the brink of mayhem. Perhaps her margin of victory would have been greater if she’d travel-banned the desperate. Perhaps littleness pays today. I doubt it in the German case. One lesson of its total annihilation was that a little man is capable of reducing the world to ruin.

A dozen years in power is a lot. Merkel is weary; Germans too. It is a time for a last act.

Forming her next coalition will take time. The Social Democrats want out; Merkel may have to turn to the left-leaning Greens and the pro-business Free Democrats, two parties with many differences. That is problematic but may stimulate change. Christian Lindner, the leader of the Free Democrats, was the bright new face of the campaign. There’s plenty of business in the pursuit of the post-carbon economy. Both the Greens and the Free Democrats are generally pro-Europe.

Merkel, given Trump, has said Europe must “take our destiny into our own hands.” That must be her last act. To build on the pro-European backlash against Trump and Brexit by forging, with President Emmanuel Macron of France, a more dynamic, more democratic, more integrated, more self-sufficient European Union for the 21st century.

European integration was Germany’s way out of the rubble of 1945. It is still the best answer to the angry ragtag band of the AfD.