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Angela Merkel in the Bundestag: It's hard to imagine life without it
Photo: Florian Gaertner / photothek / imago images
This year was tough, it took an infinite amount of strength, as the Chancellor can clearly see in her last appearances.
And that means something about Angela Merkel.
Her nimbus is also fed by the assumption of almost superhuman reserves: when her negotiating partners nod off after hours of rounds, Merkel is still fully there, when the others are still asleep, she is already awake again.
This reputation has shaped her long chancellorship.
But Angela Merkel, 66, is only human after all.
And if the nation is on the gums because of Corona, that will also apply to the country's top crisis manager at some point.
That is the position, nine months before the end of your chancellorship.
The Bundestag election on September 26th will irrevocably come to an end for CDU politician Angela Merkel.
She will have ruled for almost 16 years, just a few months less than record chancellor Helmut Kohl, her former sponsor.
The end of an era is approaching.
Ironically, the greatest burden and challenge in Merkel's long career has made her more popular than seldom before: At the end of the Corona year, her reputation with voters remains high, as current surveys show.
The vast majority of citizens trust the Chancellor in the fight against the pandemic.
The crisis is the executive's hour - and Merkel has been her biggest winner so far.
The success story is increasingly being called into question: Did the Chancellor really get Germany through the crisis so well?
Compared to other large European countries, the numbers still speak in favor of not only the virus indicators, but also the economic framework data.
But Germany is by no means as lightly as after the first wave.
Hundreds of corona deaths a day?
The Chancellor herself expresses her horror at almost every opportunity.
Merkel has seldom been seen as pleading as recently in the Bundestag - not even as emotionally: "If we have too many contacts now before Christmas and then it was last Christmas with the grandparents, then we will have missed something!" Her voice sounded brittle like never.
And the Chancellor knows that ever new aids to keep the economy running are now overwhelming even the formerly lavish public finances.
In her last turn of the year in office, Merkel is going to be a worn-out Chancellor, who nevertheless many do not want to be without the closer the farewell approaches.
The Merkel-tired pre-Corona period, in which there was constant debate about when the government will collapse, early federal elections will take place and so the Chancellor will have to go faster than planned, it seems light years away.
The last crisis dwarfed everything
On the other hand, it is becoming increasingly clear that how this crisis is handled will define Merkel's chancellorship.
The fight against the virus puts everything in the shade - and Merkel has had enough crises to cope with: financial crisis, euro crisis, refugee crisis.
The current EU Council presidency, planned as a kind of high point of your chancellorship, the efforts for a new policy towards China?
Fades behind Corona.
For the first time as Chancellor, Merkel addressed the people in 2020 beyond her New Year's address via TV address, with a "blood-sweat-and-consolation speech," as SPIEGEL colleague Christiane Hoffmann put it.
Corona is Merkel's final.
In the past few months, the Chancellor has had to realize how little influence she has as a crisis manager - and how big the gap to public satisfaction is.
With every meeting of the Prime Minister's Conference over the past few months, it has become clearer how much the heads of government of the 16 federal states have a say in crisis management.
Merkel's authority, even in the Union ranks, has shrunk significantly.
The fact that in the end, with all her admonitions and warnings, she was right to the hesitant country leaders, and even worse, it turned out to be even worse than she feared - gives Merkel no satisfaction, the situation is too serious for that.
Meanwhile, the head of government is moving further and further away from her party.
Political scientist Karl-Rudolf Korte calls her a »President of the Chancellor«.
Merkel's popularity is currently rubbed off on the CDU and CSU.
If it remains so popular until the federal election, the Union parties - regardless of which candidate for chancellor - may benefit from it.
Then Merkel would actually succeed in a tailor-made exit in the end.
She would have been the first person in Federal Republican history to voluntarily divorce the Chancellery, and at the same time she would have built a perfect bridge for her successor.
However, if your corona balance changes in the remaining nine months, exactly the opposite could occur.
But does Merkel still care what comes after her?
The Chancellor keeps completely out of the race for the CDU chairmanship, which is to be decided at the party congress on January 16.
Her favorite Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer failed as an immediate successor, now the party has to learn to walk on its own - as the then General Secretary Merkel had already put it in 1999 after the donation scandal surrounding long-time chairman Kohl.
That she could least of all live with Friedrich Merz as the successor to the party chairmanship is obvious, given the difficult relationship between the two.
After the chief election, the debate on the candidacy for chancellor, combined with the question of whether CSU chief Markus Söder would not be the most suitable for it anyway.
But Merkel will be silent on this, at least in public.
And then in mid-March the first of six state elections in 2021 are due, starting with Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate.
Thuringia will follow in April, Saxony-Anhalt will be elected in June, and in Berlin and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania the citizens will vote on their state parliaments at the same time as the federal election at the end of September.
Corona will define Merkel's chancellorship
Will Corona finally be over in autumn?
What, at least provisional, balance sheet will be drawn - and what is the first verdict on Merkel's chancellorship?
For nine months she still has it in her hand, as far as the circumstances, the prime ministers and the political opponents allow.
And then?
It will simply be gone, so difficult to imagine from today's perspective and after almost 16 years in office.
Merkel is no longer running for the Bundestag, and she has also ruled out a position in an international organization.
Her husband Joachim Sauer retired as a chemistry professor in 2017.
There is enough to do in the garden of their weekend cottage in the Uckermark, for retired opera and theater fans like the Merkel-Sauer couple, almost unlimited possibilities (if the Corona situation allows it again).
Last year, the Chancellor told SPIEGEL what she dreamed of as a GDR citizen at the time: "Seeing the Rocky Mountains, driving around in the car and hearing Bruce Springsteen - that was my dream."
There would be time for that too.
Icon: The mirror
