Angela Merkel’s Disastrous Legacy

Some celebrated legacies vanish much quicker than anyone expected. Barely three months after Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor for sixteen years, has left office her legacy is falling to pieces. Some outcomes of her long reign are so bad, especially her neglect of the armed forces and the consequences of her energy policy, that they have made Germany and Europe weaker and more vulnerable than at any time in the past two decades.

On her farewell, many media hailed Merkel as an outstanding European leader. In her third term in office, the New York Times even described her as “the last defender of the free world” (that was after Donald Trump’s election in late 2016). The Brussels edition of Politico then even assigned to her the role of “Global Saviour”. During the 2015 migrant crisis, some had compared her to Mother Teresa. “Mutti” (mother) Merkel was almost made a saint. All this hyperbolic praise now looks shallow, even absurd.

In the three months since she left the Kanzleramt, huge flaws and mistakes with some of her core policies have been brutally exposed. The Russian invasion of Ukraine sent shockwaves to Berlin because suddenly it became starkly obvious how vulnerable the Federal Republic was in the face of Putin’s aggression. Merkel’s legacy in defence policy and energy policy now looks fatally mistaken.

After sixteen years of Merkel governments, the German armed forces (Bundeswehr) are not capable of providing adequate security and support for its allies, senior generals admit. On the morning after Putin’s first soldiers went into Ukraine, Lt. Gen. Alfons Mais, the most senior officer of the Army, lamented publicly that decades of under-investment have left the German military unprepared and “more or less naked”, and added, “I am so angry!” His conclusion: “The options that we can offer our politicians for supporting our alliances are extremely limited.” In a prime-time interview on public tele­vision, former NATO General Egon Ramms was asked if the Bundeswehr was able to effectively defend the country. He replied: “Short answer: no.”

For more than two decades, Germany has spent much less than the NATO target of 2 per cent of GDP on its military. Under Merkel, the spending hovered between 1.1 and 1.2 per cent. Year after year, the annual reports of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Armed Forces highlighted the miserable state of the army and pointed out serious shortages and shortcomings of their equipment and materiel: less than half of the older fighter planes and transport helicopters and only two-thirds of the Leopard II tanks are fit for combat. Although the Defence Ministry claims that 77 per cent of main weapons systems are in working order, the Federation of Army Soldiers estimates a much lower figure of only 50 per cent operational readiness.

Merkel and her coalition governments—four years with the liberal FDP and twelve years with the Social Democrats—never showed any enthusiasm and sustained effort to prop up the country’s defensive capabilities. German public opinion was and is not fond of the Bundeswehr: most of the progressive urban elite has a pacifist outlook, believes in “the end of history” and considers hard stuff like armies an anachronism. In 2011, conscription was suspended, effectively abolished, to save money, leaving the army with serious recruiting difficulties. Brigadier Erich Vad, Merkel’s national security adviser, wrote in our book on Merkel that “the chancellor was stuck between structural pacifism and an ailing military”.

When the new “traffic light” (red-green-yellow) coalition under Chancellor Olaf Scholz came to power in early December 2021, they certainly did not put an emphasis on security policy. Their focus is on “social justice” with higher minimum wages and massive spending to fight climate change, the issue most dear to the Greens. They also included some “woke” projects like a new transgender law, adoption rights for homosexual couples and even civil unions for up to four partners. Annalena Baerbock, the new foreign minister, advocated a “feminist foreign policy” without being able to specify what that is. A writer close to the Greens, Kristina Dunz, announced in a book on “feminist foreign policy” that it means “radical disarmament” and de-escalation as the core principles. The book came out on the day of the Russian attack on Ukraine.

The new Minister of Defence, Christine Lambrecht, is totally inexperienced in military and security affairs. “The Army is not her Thing” read the headline of a widely shared report in a German newspaper. In the weeks of the Russian military build-up on the border of Ukraine, Berlin promised no more support than to give 5000 helmets—an embarrassing offer, almost an insult to the Ukrainians. The German government claimed they were legally prohibited from supplying lethal weapons to conflict regions (despite selling tanks and other weapons systems to Saudi Arabia while it has been waging war in Yemen for years, and despite giving military materiel to the Peshmerga Kurds in Northern Syria). German support for Ukraine was lamentably thin. The Berlin government even failed to put signalling sanctions in place or committing to stop the Nord Stream 2 pipeline if Russian forces crossed the Ukrainian border.

Four days after Putin’s invasion, everything changed. Scholz made a speech in the Bundestag that surprised all—most of all his own party, where pacifists like the head of the parliamentary group Rolf Mützenich always resisted giving adequate resources for the Bundeswehr. Now, without warning to his own party’s left wing, Scholz promised a new debt-financed extra spending of 100 billion euro for the army, roughly 3 per cent of GDP and more than the 2 per cent NATO target in the years to come. Of course, Scholz’s revision was also a statement of his own failure. As Finance Minister he had been co-responsible for the underfunding of the Bundeswehr for years.

Russia’s invasion, Scholz said in late February, marked “a turning point in the history of our continent”. It is clear, he said, “that we must invest much more in the security of our country, in order to protect our freedom and our democracy”. Germany needs “planes that fly, ships that sail, and soldiers who are optimally equipped for their missions”. So, basically, Germany needed a proper army. For some that came as a shock, especially the Young Socialists and the “fundamental wing” of the Greens, where some were dreaming of dissolving NATO. Although there was some mumbling and grumbling, they went along with his new policy.

THE SECOND policy area where a U-turn is much harder to achieve is energy policy. Merkel’s legacy of a green “Energiewende”—energy transition—is ideologically deeply enshrined in the thinking of the SPD and even more so of the Greens. It is not a policy but a dogma. In the early 2000s, Germany’s then left-wing government started a program of heavy subsidies for renewables, especially solar power and wind power. In March 2011, two days after the nuclear accident in Fukushima caused by the tsunami, Merkel took the abrupt decision for a complete and quick phase out of nuclear power in Germany. It was a drastic revision of her previous efforts to hold on to nuclear longer than planned by the previous red-green government. On top, her government agreed with other stakeholders to phase out coal by 2038.

During her first terms in office, Merkel was hailed as the “climate chancellor” by parts of the sympathetic press. More realistic observers saw that she adopted green policies in order to outflank the Greens electorally. A direct consequence of the heavy subsidies for renewables—about 25 billion euro per year—was that electricity prices in Germany climbed rapidly and have reached the top of all developed countries. In addition, there are increasing worries about energy security if Germany, a major industrial country, is to rely mostly on fluctuating wind and solar power in less than decade. Although it was dubbed “the world’s dumbest energy policy” by the Wall Street Journal, Germany was very proud of this parallel abandonment of nuclear and coal.

Once again, they were “world champions in energy transition”, or so they thought. In reality, while switching off nuclear and many coal power plants, Germany substituted them in the short run with gas power plants, becoming extremely dependent on natural gas—mostly from Russia, the source of 55 per cent of German gas imports in 2020. Merkel always stressed that Russia would be a reliable source of energy. Her predecessor Gerhard Schröder served as a loyal, almost slavish friend and ally to Putin, acted as an influential paid agent for Gazprom, and pushed for the construction of Nord Stream 2, the second large pipeline from Russia through the Baltic Sea to north-east Germany. (The director of the Nord Stream 2 company is a former Stasi spy who got rich through his Russian connections.) In the SPD, in Hanover and in East Germany, there was a powerful network of “friends of Russia”.

Merkel, who was brought up in socialist East Germany and is fluent in Russian, kept more distance from Putin but she also prevented the EU imposing harder sanctions after Putin’s occupation of Crimea in 2014. Despite much international criticism from Washington and Eastern Europe, the Merkel governments continued to support Nord Stream 2. When hammered by President Trump in the UN assembly, the then foreign minister Heiko Maas (SPD) smirked and stated: “Germany is certainly not dependent on Russia, especially not in energy policy.” Either he did not know or he was lying.

“It’s only when the tide goes out that you learn who’s been swimming naked,” star investor Warren Buffett famously joked. Russia’s invasion was the moment the tide turned, and it is no joke. Germany is naked. It is over-reliant on energy supplied by Kremlin companies and therefore open to blackmail. When the US administration increased the pressure to abandon oil and gas imports from Russia, Berlin hesitated. Of course, for Washington the decision for an embargo was much easier since the US imports little from Russia and is even a net exporter of oil thanks to fracking.

Germany is a large importer. Stopping Russian imports abruptly would involve huge economic costs. A very large share of German coal, oil and gas come from Russia. To put this into perspective: 34 per cent of oil consumption in Germany and over 50 per cent of gas consumption is imported from Russia as opposed to only 8 per cent of oil and less than 4 per cent of gas for the UK. The president of the Federation of German Industries, Siegfried Rosswurm, warned that the “embargo discussion was playing with fire”. Cutting off Russian oil and gas risked doing more harm to the German economy than to the Russian economy, he claimed. Probably that overstates the case.

What is true is that finding substitute supplies on the international market is much easier for coal and oil than for natural gas. The physical pipeline network tied Germany to Russia—just as Schröder had jubilantly promised, but not in a good way. The Christian Democrats have come to call for an embargo on Russian oil and most Russian gas, the new party leader Friedrich Merz supporting shutting down important Russian pipelines. International pressure is mounting, but so far, Scholz and foreign secretary Baerbock have resisted calls for an embargo. It is likely that they will concede and decide on phasing out Russian fuels albeit with a long transition period.

In the mid-1970s, after the oil price shock, Germany learned the importance of a more diversified energy supply mix. Now it has to re-learn that lesson the hard way. However, the decision to end nuclear and coal has reduced the options. Before 2011, more than 22 per cent of electricity was generated by the seventeen nuclear power plants; by 2020 eleven plants were switched off and the nuclear share was reduced to 10 per cent. At the end of 2021, three more plants were switched off in accordance with the exit plan. By the end of this year, the last three reactors are to be shut down. Internationally, Germany’s abandonment of nuclear energy is a complete outlier. President Macron of France has announced the intention to build fourteen more nuclear plants; about 70 per cent of electricity west of the Rhine is generated by nuclear plants. Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson wants to keep the present share of about 16 per cent. Construction of Hinkley Point C, the first new big plant in the UK for more than two decades, is to be completed in four years. Around the world, we see a renaissance of atomic energy.

For the German government, especially the Greens, this is anathema. On climate change policies, they boast the slogan “Follow the Science”—Greta Thunberg had one of her most enthusiastic followings worldwide in Germany—calling for radical emissions reduction. In reality, the Greens follow a dogma. Again, when the tide turns you discover who is bathing naked. Germany’s energy supply now looks increasingly unstable, with a real possibility of blackouts next winter when the last nuclear plants are gone and coal and gas are less reliably available.

It would be a huge break of taboo for the Greens to consider a U-turn on nuclear energy. Robert Habeck, the Greens minister for the economy and climate, ordered an audit of the possibilities—purportedly without any “ban on thinking”. His assistants came up with the desired result that reviving the last nuclear plants would be “too risky” and not “viable”. Under Habeck’s plans, most of the country will be covered with thousands more wind turbines, destroying natural landscapes but not guaranteeing a stable supply of energy.

However, there is a shift in priorities in European energy policy, away from the obsession with emissions reduction towards a somewhat more realistic approach emphasising energy security. The European Council issued a “Declaration of Versailles” calling for a substantial reduction in dependency on Russia and more diversified oil and gas supplies including the exploration of more oil and gas fields in Europe.

Germany’s new ruling coalition consists of a rather heterogeneous mix of political parties and ideologies. The economically liberal FDP with their emphasis on sound public finances and the promise to stop tax hikes, representing the “Mittelstand” (small and medium entrepreneurs), is ideologically and sociologically distant from the Greens, who represent urban academic post-materialistic and feminist voters keen on spending a lot to “save the planet” and the transformation of the economy and society through bureaucratic state planning, quotas and targets. Their coalition agreement was titled “Dare to progress” which can be translated into “Dare to have more left-wing ideology and more state planning”.

In their woke pacifistic fantasy world, the Greens are obsessed with politically correct pronouns, imposing gender-neutral language, eliminating discrimination of all sorts and comforting minorities. This was their utopian “end of history”. For them, the Ukraine crisis is a brutal wake-up call. Rather than fretting about micro-aggressions through insensitive language, they have to deal with a macro-aggression, a war in a not-so-faraway country. Welcome back to Realpolitik.

GERMANY after Merkel will most likely see a realignment of party politics, a shift back to more traditional positions. This is most important for the CDU. In the twenty years with Merkel at the head, the Christian Democrats have shifted markedly to the Centre and even in some areas touched the Centre-Left, abandoning many of their previous core positions and eliminating their conservative wing that had been strong in the Kohl era. Friedrich Merz, the leader of the parliamentary faction at the turn of the millennium, was pushed to the side in 2000.

Before 2005, some political observers believed Merkel could be a German equivalent of Margaret Thatcher. Nothing could have been further from reality. While Thatcher famously exclaimed, “The lady is not for turning”, Merkel governed in response to the zeitgeist. She became a chameleon of power, adjusting her colour to the backdrop.

There is a remarkable list of major sudden changes of policies. Most prominent is the abrupt “Atomwende”. She also completely changed the CDU’s stance on conscription, softened the resistance against common European debts during the euro crisis, and changed CDU family policies by adopting a more “modern” version very similar to SPD policies. Furthermore, there was the famous (or infamous) abrupt U-turn during the migrant crisis when she suddenly decided in September 2015 to open the border to an uncontrolled influx of hundreds of thousands. Her “welcome policy” signal—and generous welfare benefits for migrants—acted as strong pull factors. In the end, more than one and a half million such migrants arrived in Germany.

During Merkel’s reign, Germany’s traditional landscape of political parties disintegrated. The leftward shift of the CDU opened a space for the emergence of a new party on the Right, the Alternative for Germany (AfD). Merkel can rightly be called a midwife of the AfD, which started as a Eurosceptic party and has since shifted further to the Right but has consolidated support of about 10 per cent of votes.

In the 2017 general elections, Merkel’s Christian Democrats got the worst result in their history since 1949 with 32.9 per cent of the votes. At the end of Merkel’s sixteen years the CDU looked exhausted. Her lacklustre candidate Armin Laschet led the party into a devastating defeat, coming second behind the SPD, with only 24 per cent of the votes. The Merkel CDU had imploded.

Merkel was hailed as “Queen of Europe” albeit often with a bit of sarcasm. During the euro crisis, Germany attracted hatred because its massive credit support came with conditions. During the migrant crisis, Germany’s “Willkommenspolitik” was seen with incredulity by her neighbours. It was compared to a “hippie state led by feelings” (in the words of British political scientist Anthony Glees). Eastern European states like Hungary and Poland took a firm stance against uncontrolled mass immigration of mostly young men from alien cultural—mostly Muslim—backgrounds. Merkel’s insistence on quotas for the redistribution of irregular immigrants led to a schism between Western European countries willing to accept more immigration and the Eastern European countries who resented being told by Brussels which kind of immigration to accept.

Now Europe faces another huge migration wave from Ukraine, but public sentiment in Poland and Hungary is totally different. There is a huge show of solidarity and support for war refugees, mostly women and children. More than a million arrived in the first two weeks in Poland and Hungary and they have been given shelter. Germany can no longer claim the humanitarian high ground. Scholz’s government has consistently shown limited support for Ukraine’s freedom fight and has retarded the necessary imposition of harsh sanctions on the aggressor.

Philip Plickert is a journalist with the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, working as business correspondent in London. He is the editor, most recently, of Merkel: Die kritische Bilanz nach 16 Jahren Kanzlerschaft (Merkel: A Critical Account of 16 Years as Chancellor).