By John O'Sullivan
Saturday, September 24, 2016
‘The graveyards are full of indispensable men,” said De
Gaulle, or his predecessor Georges Clemenceau, or New York publisher Elbert
Hubbard, or one of several other less famous people with a good turn of phrase,
according to the scrupulously careful online Quote Investigator. Be that as it
may, it’s looking increasingly likely that the (political) graveyard will soon
be welcoming an “indispensable” woman, recently sanctified as such on the cover
of The Economist, namely German
chancellor Angela Merkel. Her Christian Democrat party fell to third place in
Berlin’s local elections last week and may not stay long in the city’s
governing coalition. Two thirds of German voters now want her gone. And the
names of successors are being freely canvassed.
This decline and the associated rise of the right-wing
Alternative for Germany party are being blamed on Merkel’s unqualified
invitation to Syrian refugees to come to Germany last year. More than 1 million
migrants have done so in the intervening twelve months — many of them neither
Syrian nor refugees — and they have led to a large rise in violent and “hate”
crimes, some committed by them, some by those protesting their arrival. These
things are frightening not only the voters, but also nervous members of
Merkel’s own parliamentary party devoted to their own careers before hers. For
them, the writing is on the Berlin Wall.
Even those drafting her advance obituaries, however, seem
to regard her tenure as chancellor as having been an overall success marked by
prudence and achievement. She is generally still seen as “a safe pair of hands”
— and indeed the best election poster for the CDU last time was a simple
picture of a pair of hands. You can make that case — I’ll do so in a moment as
a kind of exercise — but only on grounds that would alarm her admirers and
threaten her reputation. By any respectable criterion, she is a klutz on a
heroic scale.
Consider the following examples:
1. Merkel’s energy policy was based upon a combination of
nuclear power and “renewables” in order to close down power stations dependent
on fossil fuels, and help Germany lead the European Union and the world toward
a carbon-free future. She had been a strong defender of nuclear energy against
SPD chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s attempts to phase it out. Within a few weeks
of the Japanese nuclear disaster at Fukushima, though, she panicked, reversed
herself, and closed down Germany’s entire nuclear program. Her Energiewende
since then has led to a massive increase in power bills for consumers and industry,
the movement abroad of German companies heavily reliant on energy, and, more
recently, a phasing out of the phasing out of coal-fired power stations. Merkel
and the nuclear companies are still haggling over how much the German
government will pay for the estimated €23 billion cost of shutting down their
plants. Meanwhile, no one believes that Germany and Europe will meet their
official goal of reducing carbon emissions 80-95 percent from their 1990 levels
by the year 2050.
2. The refugee crisis is all too plainly a vast mistake,
as Merkel herself has admitted. But some of its side-effects have produced
other crises almost as severe. Example one: though Merkel welcomed “Syrian
refugees” without consulting even her colleagues in the German government, she
immediately demanded that other European states within the then-borderless
Schengen Zone should accept them as well. That demand was resisted (and still
is) by other governments, and there’s been a long-running “existential”
(Jean-Claude Juncker’s word, not mine) crisis in the EU ever since. Example
two: Merkel reduced the flow of Middle Eastern migrants into the EU through a
deal with Turkish strongman Recep Tayyik Erdogan to control the border. But the
price was high: the EU’s silence over Erdogan’s arbitrary arrest of thousands
of soldiers, police, lawyers, and journalists, and visa-free entry into the EU
for 80 million Turks, which could mean another migrant crisis down the road.
There’s no guarantee that Erdogan — who’s skilled at selling the same horse
twice — won’t ask for additional concessions from a desperate Merkel and EU,
either.
3. Whether Brexit is a good idea for Britain — as I think
it is — Merkel and her EU colleagues all devoutly believe that it’s bad for
Europe. But she helped to create the circumstances that made it happen by
rejecting all of PM David Cameron’s demands except for the most trivial — and
even then the concessions the EU offered were legally reversible. It was a
serious setback for her and for her lodestar of European unity. And it came
about because at a time when populist parties were rising throughout Europe,
including the AFD in Germany, she complacently assumed that the risk of Brexit
was not a serious one. She had confidence that Cameron would win but gave him no
real help in doing so. He resigned; she was further weakened.
4. When Merkel won her first election in 2004, she
represented a more general shift to the liberal economic right in German
politics. Chancellor Schröder — the SPD leader she narrowly defeated — had
ushered in some market-friendly economic reforms that many now credit for
making the German economy more dynamic. Indeed, Merkel herself praised him for
doing so. Since then, however, she has presided over a shift back to the Left.
By blocking the demands of the CDU’s traditional coalition partner, the Free
Democrats, for tax cuts and a more market-friendly approach, she made them look
weak and ineffective. As a result, they fell below the 5 percent threshold for
entry into the Bundestag for the first time since 1945. Though the 2013
election was generally reported as a victory for Merkel and the CDU, in fact it
ushered in a small parliamentary majority for the Left. That had consequences.
To retain the coalition and her chancellorship, Merkel had to agree to a series
of small socialist reforms required by the SPD — notably, a quite generous
minimum wage and a reduction in the pension age. Judged by results, Merkel
looks more and more East German with every passing election. (Incidentally, the
Free Democrats now favor some restrictions on immigration.)
5. Merkel’s Euro policy has proved — astounding though it
sounds — even more destructive than her immigration policy. By insisting that
Germany had to prove its loyalty to Europe by ruling out any reform of the
Euro’s structure, she imprisoned Southern European countries in an over-valued
exchange rate that inflicted recession, unemployment, and a debt crisis on them
indefinitely. It’s hard to express the damage this has done to millions of
human lives, but here’s one measure: Though the average unemployment rate for
the Eurozone hovered between 10 and 12 percent from 2010 to 2016 and the
Eurozone youth-unemployment rate hovered between 20 and 22 percent over the
same period, the youth-unemployment rate in Mediterranean Europe has generally
been around the 50 percent mark. (There have been corresponding problems for
northern Europe in the subsidies their taxpayers have had to pay to keep
Greece, Spain, and Portugal solvent and inside the straitjacket.) Political
instability has accordingly flourished in the South, with successive
governments losing elections and extreme Marxist parties coming to or near
power. Relations between different European countries — above all, Greece and
Germany — have been permanently poisoned. Democracy itself has been sidelined
by Brussels as it replaced elected prime ministers with its own favored
technocrats. In short, nothing has damaged European unity more than Merkel’s
blindly unreasoning insistence on an un-reformed Euro.
As a result of these and other blunders by the
“indispensable” Merkel, Europe is facing a series of disabling crises.
So what was the argument above that shows Merkel to be a
success, even if only in ways her admirers cannot openly endorse? Well, the
Euro is a disaster for some countries (where it’s an over-valued currency) but
a boon to others (where it’s under-valued). Germany is an export-oriented
economy. It benefits from having an under-valued currency, which keeps its
export prices low and its market share large. For Germany, the Euro is
under-valued, its exchange rate held down by the presence of economies such as
Greece and Spain. So Germany’s export industries can sell at artificially low
prices not only to other Eurozone member-states but also to the rest of the
world. It’s true that in the cases of Greece and Spain, Berlin and the EU have
to keep sending fresh money down to Athens and Madrid in order to help their
peoples to keep buying German goods. But no worries: That’s paid for by the
taxpayers of all Eurozone
governments. No government is needed to finance consumers in China, Africa, and
North America to purchase German exports. In those cases the rising sale of
German exports is financed by the falling market shares of non-Eurozone rival
companies — and of course by the rising unemployment rates of Mediterranean
Europe.
You can see why German industries and the CDU might not
want to draw attention to that.
As the shades gather, are there any strong arguments for
Merkel to remain? Well, a feminist writer in the Daily Telegraph suggests that she has shown that women can exercise
power. Hmmmmm. Hadn’t that point already been proven by Golda Meir, Indira
Gandhi, and Margaret Thatcher — not to mention Queen Elizabeth I, Catherine de
Medici, and Cleopatra? And won’t the point lose its intended force if the
results of Merkel’s exercising power continue to be relentlessly negative? Have
I mentioned Putin and Ukraine yet?
As always when a leader stumbles, the cry is heard: But
there’s no one to replace her! See de Gaulle, Clemenceau, and Elbert Hubbard
above for a sufficient answer to that argument. Besides, there are, in fact,
several names being mentioned as potential replacements, mostly the photogenic
young thrusters who always strike journalists as just what the nation needs: on
this occasion, Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière, Defense Minister Ursula
von der Leyen, and Jens Spahn, cited by an Irish correspondent as “the
ambitious 36-year-old deputy finance minister.”
All of them are doubtless terrific, but what about
someone who’s shown some ability to grasp what’s gone wrong and how it might be
put right? At last year’s “European Summit” on the Greek crisis, Wolfgang
Schäuble, the German Finance Minister, proposed a rescue package for Greece that
would grant generous loans not to keep Greece inside the poisoned Shirt of
Nessus but to help the country to leave the Euro and survive the inevitable
difficulties of the transition to a new independent currency that would allow
it to compete again. It was seriously discussed but ultimately vetoed by Merkel
and Hollande as the end of Europe or some such free-flowing nonsense. Schäuble
also commented with deadly obliqueness on Merkel’s invitation to migrants:
“Avalanches can easily be triggered if a careless skier disturbs even just a
small bit of snow.” That tells us something.
And his other qualities?
Well, he’s the finance minister credited with Germany’s
economic soundness, an experienced MP of some 44 years’ standing, and a
political realist supportive of the EU but not in the grip of utopianism. Best
of all, at the age of 74, he would take office older than Ronald Reagan, Konrad
Adenauer, and either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. Mrs. Merkel could then
explain she was making way for an older man. I think that would be a graceful
gesture, and Helmut Kohl for one would certainly enjoy it.
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