Goodbye to the chancellor

Angela Merkel on September 7 when she left the German Parliament.JOHN MACDOUGALL / AFP

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• The Merkel method: This is how the German Chancellor has led Europe

The federal elections this Sunday will illuminate a new leadership in the key country of the European Union. The next government will have to deal with three parties, and not just two, and the same figure of Angela Merkel is impossible to repeat. It has been key both internally and internationally. For four terms and 16 years, he has given his position his sober, pragmatic style and at the same time close to the daily troubles of his compatriots. She was the first woman to become chancellor in the history of her country and although she has demanded more presence of women in different forums, only recently, this same month of September, has she proclaimed herself a feminist. They want to participate in the wind of history.

But it has also become a global benchmark for other reasons. Under the shadow of the great Europeanist Helmut Kohl, at first it was perceived in a more nationalist than European key, but later it knew how to correct it between lights and shadows to become a relevant interlocutor of Europe with the rest of the world.

The best asset of the unemployed chancellor lies in having almost always deployed sensible policies through the continuous search for the political center and away from the extremes. With this flexibility, which in Spain is branded for the internal policy of inconsistency and opportunism, he led coalition governments with different partners: on three occasions Social Democrats, and on one occasion, Liberals. Thus, he also drew up an iron cordon against ultra-right populism, which he ended up undermining under his firm defense of democratic principles. This trip also involved the search for a political center of gravity that would unite values ​​and interests, the nation and the Union, the domestic and the global, the economy and the social. He applied the same approach to continental and international relations. In the Ukraine crisis and the Russian invasion of Crimea failed,including the construction of a second gas pipeline with Russia that increases its dependence on Russian gas. In the Great Recession of 2008, it caused enormous suffering with erroneous austerity fiscal policies that aggravated the situation and caused a terrible social crisis in southern Europe. His public image still carries that error.

On other occasions, he was completely right. He did so in his quick reaction to the Fukushima nuclear explosion, reverting to the nuclear bet. In the Brexit negotiation, he was able to avoid London's intention of reaching a separate and / or disintegrating agreement, to the undermining of the greater objective impact of the German industry and exports. Despite initial attempts at unilateralism, it also supported a European health policy against the pandemic, especially in vaccination, and was able to embody the best European virtues by welcoming refugees in 2015, despite the political cost that it entailed. Without their drive, the economic recovery strategy through the Next Generation plan and common debt would not have been the same either.

Its concrete balance is therefore very worthy, although the timidity of internal investments (in infrastructures, in digitization) or the scant transformation effort in the reforms may be held back.

But Merkel has, in the end, ended Germany's equation as an economic giant and a political dwarf.

Although there is room to move faster, it has also succeeded in making Germany a locomotive in this last dimension.