Merkel Enters Last Leg of Re-election Bid With a Push to Draw In Youths
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Version 0 of 1. BERLIN — After a summer dominated by questioning of her policy toward Europe and tangles over Germany’s role in large-scale intelligence gathering by the United States, Chancellor Angela Merkel kicked off the final phase of her campaign for re-election on Tuesday with an unusual visit to a high school in the former East Berlin. There the reflexively private chancellor gave select seniors a history lesson of a rarely personal kind, since Tuesday was the 52nd anniversary of the building of the Berlin Wall, which Ms. Merkel experienced as a 7-year-old girl living in East Germany. Just under 10 million of the almost 62 million Germans entitled to vote are aged 18 to 30, and Ms. Merkel, 59, who is seeking a third four-year term in national elections on Sept. 22, seems keen to win them for her center-right Christian Democrats. On Monday, as she returned from a two-week vacation — she hiked in the Alps with her husband, Joachim Sauer — the youth magazine Neon published a lengthy interview with the chancellor, who let drop that her worst foible was once drinking too much cherry wine and underscored that love can be forever, despite divorcing her first husband, Ulrich Merkel, whom she married as a student. Reflecting her central role in German politics — even her Social Democratic opponents feature Ms. Merkel on their campaign posters — a new Web page (www.angela-merkel.de) features pictures from her childhood and youth that seemed designed — like Tuesday’s school visit — to dispel any whiff of closeness to the Communists who led East Germany. She is still close, she says, to her brother, Marcus, a scientist, and her sister, Irene, bound by “the Christian values and openness to the world” of their childhood in Templin, about 60 miles northeast of Berlin, where her father was a pastor. Over a picture where she looks fondly at her husband, a quantum chemist, she writes of their common love of the open air, and of opera. Left out are such matters as the woes of the euro, the uncertain future of the European Union, the rows over intelligence and the enmity of some leading intellectuals. The newsmagazine Der Spiegel, kicking off an election series last week, devoted several pages to this disdain for the chancellor, blaming her for a mood characterized by Peter Sloterdijk, Germany’s leading philosopher, as “lethargocracy.” This past weekend, an opinion piece in the center-left newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung depicted Ms. Merkel as spreading “poison” by having essentially removed Europe from the election campaign. “Europeans are looking to Germany, because it is clear to them that the future of the European Union essentially depends on this country,” Daniel Brössler wrote. “But what they get to see is a nation which is behaving at the moment as if this all has nothing to do with it.” Paul Nolte, a history professor in Berlin who leans toward the Christian Democrats but is also critical of them, retorted that it was hard to blame Ms. Merkel for the national mood, which he characterized more as “wait-and-see,” even as Germany enjoys low unemployment rates and relatively high wages envied by many of its European neighbors. “It is sometimes striking what kind of Merkel-hate you confront” in the news media, Dr. Nolte said by telephone from Munich. “It is hatred with a perfidy that I find astonishing,” particularly, he said, when one contrasts the broad consensus on topics like gay marriage, or an expansion of kindergartens to allow German mothers to work, with the recent, sometimes violent, protests against gay marriage in neighboring France. Regardless of whether, after the elections, Greece demands new bailout money or, more gravely, the euro is in fresh peril, Ms. Merkel knows that, for now, her future depends more on the campaign, and the almost 60 stops she already plans to make all over Europe’s dominant country. Judging by the teenagers she met in school on Tuesday, Ms. Merkel has hard work ahead. The schoolyard harbored some fans: Gordon Zückert, an 18-year-old senior, said he would vote for her in September. “She has done her homework,” he said. “Her politics are good, and there is a reason why she has been elected more than once.” But other seniors, like Louise Debatin, 18, who whipped out her cellphone as the chancellor arrived and snapped herself with Ms. Merkel, said they were more likely to vote Green. Like many young Germans, several pupils wore flower badges indicating their environmental engagement and opposition to nuclear energy — something the physicist chancellor decided after the 2011 earthquake and nuclear accident in Japan that she, too, wants to phase out. Political differences notwithstanding, Ms. Debatin was convinced that Ms. Merkel did the right thing in coming to give a personal view of the Communist East. Visiting Berlin museums on this city’s turbulent history, Ms. Debatin said, is “really frightening.” Listening to her mother — she “was right there live when the wall fell,” in 1989 — and her grandmother — “she saw the wall go up, and come down” — really made her appreciate today’s freedom of movement, Ms. Debatin said. Exactly what Ms. Merkel imparted during almost an hour lesson with the seniors remained largely a secret. The youth magazine said to have invited her reported bland quotes from three participants about Ms. Merkel’s warmth, humor and openness. The leader herself, emerging from the school, did not even repeat what she had told biographers in the past: her memory of Sunday, Aug. 13, 1961, when her father had to preach in church and “everybody was crying.” Tears and solemnity, of course, were featured at memorials around Berlin on Tuesday, commemorating the almost 140 people who lost their lives trying to cross the barbed wire, minefields and multiple barriers that made up the Berlin Wall. Unlike beautiful, more manicured Paris, Berlin offers up its history raw, and ever-present. The chancellor, Ms. Debatin said, was right to recall “what a journey this city has behind it.” The cold war clash of capitalism and Communism “included all of Germany, of course, but Berlin is special — two lives in one city,” Ms. Debatin said. “That <em>is</em> Berlin, and that’s what makes Berlin special.” <em> </em> |