Angela Merkel will probably be replaced as Chancellor in the coming year.
This ends a 16-year term of office.
A look back at their fateful years.
In the financial crisis of 2008 Angela Merkel * fought for our money.
In the refugee crisis of 2015 she fought for refugees from all over the world.
In the 2020 Corona crisis, she fought against a malicious virus.
Munich
- The record of
Helmut Kohl *
is
Angela Merkel
probably not break: The chancellor of unity brought it between 1 October 1982 and 26 October 1998, exactly 5,869 days as head of government.
In order to rule longer than her predecessor in office,
Merkel
would have
to hold out until December 17, 2021.
The Merkel era is coming to an end: how will it be remembered?
But there is nothing to suggest that the Chancellor will not keep her announcement: After the
federal election
on September 26, 2021, we will have a new Chancellor - and the
Merkel era
is over after 16 years.
It was 16 years full of fateful crises.
Merkel
ended
her long term of office
with the greatest of all challenges
- in the hope that the
corona crisis * will
largely end in autumn thanks to the vaccine.
Then she would probably not go down in history as the “refugee chancellor”, but as the “corona chancellor”.
Merkel
was sworn in as head of government for the first time
on November 22, 2005
- and just as nobody at the beginning had any idea that “Kohl's girls” could
fight for power
in the
CDU * men's club
, nobody could have imagined this 51-year-old at the time "Woman from the East" would rule our country for so long.
And that it would manage to become a global anchor of stability in times when venerable democracies like the
USA
or
Great Britain
would slide into crises that were unthinkable at the time.
Former Environment Minister Merkel is losing sight of her goal
The climate crisis:
At the beginning of her term in office,
Merkel
wanted to
score points as "Climate Chancellor".
Former
Environment Minister *
visited
Greenland
in August 2007 together with her then Vice-Chancellor
Sigmar Gabriel
(SPD) to see the ice melt on site.
When the massive tsunami destroyed the Japanese
nuclear power plant in Fukushima
in March 2011
, she decided to phase out
nuclear power
- a revolution for a Union politician.
Over the years, however, the criticism from environmentalists that
Merkel was
increasingly losing sight of
the environment has become louder
.
For example, she prevented stricter limit values for heavy sedans in the EU - in the end, the car lobby was more important to her than
environmental protection
.
+
On October 5, 2008 Angela Merkel and Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück promise: The savings are safe.
© Rainer Jensen / dpa
The financial crisis of 2008:
The bankruptcy of
Lehman Bank
in the USA on September 15, 2008 plunged the world economy into an unprecedented
financial crisis
.
The Chancellor and her then Finance Minister
Peer Steinbrück
(SPD) appeared together in front of the press to promise that the state would guarantee citizens' savings.
The huge guarantee prevented the Germans from storming the banks - and so
Merkel
managed
to get a historic crisis under control.
However, it became expensive for taxpayers and savers - Landesbanken such as
BayernLB
had to be saved with tens of billions in taxes, as did private banks, above all
Hypo Real Estate
.
On October 5, 2009, HRE was nationalized as the first bank in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany since 1949.
The 2015 refugee crisis:
“We can
do it
”: This sentence at the height of the
refugee crisis
, which began with the admission of the refugees stuck for days at the Budapest train station, annoyed
Merkel's opponents
.
Looking back, one can see that
Germany
actually managed to integrate the almost 1.5 million refugees from Arab countries such as
Syria
and
sub-Saharan Africa
who
arrived in 2015 and 2016
.
Angela Merkel's behavior in the refugee crisis also weighed on the CDU / CSU
Union crisis:
the refugee question divided the
CDU
and
CSU *
- symbolic of the humiliating treatment of the Chancellor at the Munich
CSU party congress
on November 20, 2015, when the then
CSU boss Horst Seehofer left Merkel
standing next to him like a schoolgirl during his speech.
+
At the Munich CSU party congress in November 2015, Horst Seehofer humiliated the visibly sour chancellor.
© Sven Hoppe / dpa
Ukraine crisis:
The eternal Chancellor also became a central figure on the world stage - for example as a mediator in the
Ukraine war
after the illegal occupation of Crimea by forces loyal to Russia.
The success remains manageable, but the perfectly Russian-speaking Chancellor is probably one of the few Western politicians who
Russian President Vladimir Putin *
respects, perhaps even fears.
US crisis:
Already under
Barack Obama
, the relationship to
Washington
charged after coming out that US intelligence abhörten the mobile phone of Chancellor.
It gets really icy under
Trump
.
* Merkur.de is part of the Ippen-Digital network.
At the moment Angela Merkel has to deal with the corona lockdown *.
This is expected to be extended beyond January 10th.
