October 12, 2018
Angela Merkel Could Save Europe. Why Won’t She?
Campaigning in the spring of 2017, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany declared at a packed beer hall in Bavaria that it was time for Europe to “take its destiny into its own hands.” In the face of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, Hungary’s slide into illiberalism and an American president who viewed the European Union with disdain, Europe, she argued, needed a leader who could push forward reform and push back against its detractors. Ms. Merkel vowed that she was ready to be that leader.
Unfortunately, in the 18 months since, Ms. Merkel has failed to fulfill that pledge. The European Union’s promise to form an “ever closer union” seems more like an empty slogan than a strategy these days. But further integration is necessary. With Europe besieged by illiberal forces inside (Hungary) and from outside (Vladimir Putin’s Russia), and voters electing anti-European Union populists, leaders across the Continent need to demonstrate that they are confident about Europe’s shared future. Ms. Merkel clearly understands this — but she isn’t helping Europe to do anything about it.
Ms. Merkel’s troubles started with the September 2017 election, when her party, the center-right Christian Democrats, and the center-left Social Democrats lost a stunningly large number of voters to the far-right Alternative for Germany. The message was clear: Enthusiasm for Ms. Merkel was waning. It then took the parties more than four months to form a government. Once a coalition was finally established in March, the hope among many pro-European policymakers was that Ms. Merkel would find her footing and return to the European agenda that she had highlighted during the campaign.
Members of her own team have made that difficult. Her interior minister, Horst Seehofer, the head of the Christian Social Union, nearly brought down the entire government last summer when he threatened to resign over Ms. Merkel’s relatively open immigration policies. That crisis was averted, but Mr. Seehofer continues to contradict and challenge the chancellor. And he isn’t the only one. Last month, Ms. Merkel’s own party ousted Volker Kauder, one of her closest allies in the Bundestag, the lower house of Parliament. “The Merkel era is officially over,” a journalist friend of mine texted me when the news broke.
Read the full article at The New York Times.
More from CNAS
-
Luke Coffey on Brexit and the Future of the Special Relationship
Podcast
Luke Coffey, Director of the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy at the Heritage Foundation, sits down with Jim Townsend to talk about the future of UK defense...
By Jim Townsend & Luke Coffey
-
Trump Gets NATO Backwards
Commentary
Returning from the World War I armistice commemoration in Paris, President Trump reemphasized his view of America’s European allies. “We pay for large portions of other countr...
By Richard Fontaine
-
LtGen Jan Broeks and LtGen Esa Pulkkinen on EU/NATO Cooperation
Podcast
LtGen Jan Broeks, DG of the NATO International Military Staff, and LtGen Esa Pulkkinen, DG of the EU Military Staff, sat down with Dr. Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Jim Townsend t...
By Andrea Kendall-Taylor, Jim Townsend, Jan Broeks & Esa Pulkkinen
-
The United States' Greatest Strength Over Russia and China is Its Alliance with Europe
Commentary
President Donald Trump has rightly recognized that America must do more to stand up to Chinese and Russian threats to U.S. interests. While most agree that having a national s...
By Andrea Kendall-Taylor & Julianne Smith
