BERLIN — Even before Chancellor Angela Merkel’s chosen successor announced this week that she would step aside, sending German politics into deeper disarray, there were complaints about German leadership in Europe.
Ms. Merkel lacked vision, was long the refrain of her critics at home and abroad. The chancellor of 14 years was risk-averse. Her nation, as a whole, had yet to shed the inhibitions that came with its history, leaving it unwilling or unable to take a decisive role in defending the multilateral system, even as President Trump has moved to trash it.
Those concerns will come into even sharper focus this week, with the opening on Friday of the annual Munich Security Conference, the foreign-policy world’s answer to the World Economic Forum in Davos, where analysts and diplomats from all over will gather to discuss the security challenges facing the world.
It is telling that, 30 years after German reunification, Germany and its stagnant government, split ideologically and with Ms. Merkel in her last year in office, will barely feature on the agenda. Ms. Merkel herself won’t be in Munich. But the German question will be a prime topic of discussion among those taking part.
“Germany is the elephant in the room,” said Jan Techau, director of the German Marshall Fund’s office in Berlin. “Today Germany and its leadership in the security realm are once again foremost on everyone’s mind,” he said. “Everyone is waiting for Germany.”
The resignation on Monday of Ms. Merkel’s chosen successor, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, will only intensify questions about where Germany is headed.
The uncertainty over who will succeed Ms. Merkel means that Germany will be inwardly focused for many months to come, extending the sense of paralysis that is frustrating Germany’s allies in the European Union and Washington.
It is not that Germany’s elites do not recognize the many problems piling up around them. A small but vibrant foreign policy community has long identified the need for more strategic thinking, more investment in key technologies, a greener economy and a stronger eurozone.
It has recognized the challenges — from climate change to Russian meddling to the technological standoff between the United States and China — that risk leaving Europe behind.
But even as China, Russia and President Trump’s America seem to circle Europe like predators on issues ranging from trade and competition to Ukraine and Huawei, the political leadership to translate this into policies that German voters support has been missing.
“There is no sense of urgency,” said Mr. Techau. “The fact that we have a Trump situation, a China situation, a Russia situation — none of that is really on the radar outside a tiny strategic community.”
One reason is that Germany has been doing so well. For many Germans, especially in the old and dominant western Germany, Ms. Merkel’s time in office has been a time of stability and rising prosperity.
“We have a defensive status-quo society underpinning a defensive status-quo power,” said Timothy Garton Ash, professor of European history at Oxford University.
In recent years an undercurrent of anxiety about the future has crept in, but that, he said, has translated into a popular sentiment of “let’s hang on to what we’ve got.”
The idea of change is a hard sell to a people who got rich and powerful by exercising restraint in the decades after World War II, Mr. Techau pointed out.
“Germany became rich, powerful, reunified and got its full sovereignty back,” Mr. Techau said. “And now the same nations who told us to exercise restraint are telling us to lead. Germans aren’t buying it yet.”
One senses German fatigue with expectations of leadership even as its own domestic politics fragments, a far-right party grows and Germany’s traditional dominance in 20th-century technology is being superseded by electric cars, 5G communications and artificial intelligence.
“We’ve been living off our past glories and achievements for a while, and slow to adapt to digitalization and AI and even the ‘Green Deal,’” said Sophia Besch, of the Berlin office of the Center for European Reform.
Ms. Merkel, a Christian Democrat, is admired and even revered as a leader “who made everyone feel safe,” Ms. Besch said. “But her stagnation is getting mixed up with Germany’s, and it’s hard to decide how much is her and how much is the state.”
Who will lead Germany next is by no means clear, with general disappointment in the visible alternatives.
Guntram Wolff, a German who directs the Bruegel economic research institute in Brussels, said that with Ms. Merkel’s failure to produce an orderly transition, major European Union initiatives would be likely to go nowhere until the autumn of next year.
As an indication of the battles ahead, Ms. Kramp-Karrenbauer has been in an almost permanent feud with the foreign minister, Heiko Maas.
Mr. Maas comes from the Christian Democrats’ shrinking coalition partners, the Social Democrats, who are afraid of early elections, and have chosen to remain in government while loudly broadcasting their policy complaints.
“No one can imagine Germany without Merkel and no one seems up to the job,” Ms. Besch said. “There’s anxiety that stems from that, too.”
Germany has traditionally acted reactively and pragmatically, with little strategic vision, said Henrik Enderlein, president and professor of political economy at the Hertie School in Berlin.
“Germany is sleepwalking,” Professor Enderlein said. After the fall of the wall and reunification, “German thinking has still not recovered from this idea that if we wait long enough everything will be fine,” he said.
Nor has Germany been prepared “to suffer economic pain for political and foreign-policy gains,” said Christian Odendahl, a German economist with the Center for European Reform in Berlin. “And this is now a Germany feeling economically insecure about its future.”
Those insecurities stem in part from its dependency, more than most, on exports to and investments in China, which influences policy on everything from Huawei to Hong Kong and leads to caution about how much to risk to strengthen the euro.
Ms. Merkel’s risk-averse incrementalism is part of her disconnect with President Emmanuel Macron of France, who is full of strategic visions for Europe but has shown scant ability to carry them out.
The two leaders not only disagree, but they do not get along, making the direction of a post-Brexit European Union less clear than it might otherwise be.
With the election of Mr. Trump, there was wide expectation that Ms. Merkel would become the prime defender of the rules-based, multilateral order that has served Germany and Europe so well.
“When Trump took office, we talked of Merkel as the leader of the West, but who would say that now?” asked Anna Wieslander, a Swede and director for Northern Europe of the Atlantic Council.
“It’s a sign of the negative direction Germany has taken,” she added. “We want Germany to lead, because it tries to unite Europeans while France is more disruptive, but Germany is not there.”
Ms. Merkel will simply not take risks even when they are necessary, said Julianne Smith, a former Obama official now with the German Marshall Fund in Washington. “It’s the worst of all worlds — we need Merkel to lead and sadly it’s not happening,” she said.
A former foreign minister, Sigmar Gabriel of the Social Democrats, has talked broadly of Europe as a vegetarian in a world of carnivores, a point he reinforced in a recent telephone interview. That is overstretched, but gets to the heart of the German question.
“A country of our size and economic and technological power,” he said, “a land of our geostrategic location and with our global interests can’t just stand on the margins and watch.”
Katrin Bennhold reported from Berlin and Steven Erlanger from Brussels.
Source : Nytimes
