Announcing on Sunday she will seek a fourth term in office,
Germany's Angela Merkel faces perhaps the biggest test of her career: defending
the European and transatlantic status quo amid huge uncertainty for both. Already
chancellor for 11 years, she must now anchor a western alliance shaken by
Donald Trump's U.S. election victory, and bind together a European Union in
which Germany has forged its post-war identity but which now risks breaking
apart.
What is more, with the imminent departure of U.S. President
Barack Obama, Merkel alone stands as the West's last great hope for liberal
democracy - a mantle she must assume from a position of diminished standing at
home, and which may prove too much. "If she chooses to continue, she will
have big burdens," Obama told reporters during a farewell visit to Berlin
last week. "I wish I could be there to lighten her load somewhat, but she
is tough."
She will need to be. To succeed on the international stage
in a fourth term, Merkel must first heal divisions over her open-door refugee
policy that has alienated the Bavarian wing of her nation-wide conservative
alliance. Polls put her Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) on around 33 percent,
down some 10 percentage points from summer last year.
Merkel will campaign for next September's election in an
increasingly fractured political landscape, in which the far-right Alternative
for Germany (AfD) is likely to enter the national parliament for the first time
next year. Her likely coalition partners are the Social Democrats (SPD), who
are some 10 points behind her conservatives and with whom she now rules. But
the AfD's rise makes coalition building more complicated and voters also risk
becoming tired of her.
"Boredom weakens you, even makes for ridicule, just as
it did in Kohl's fourth and final term," said Josef Joffe, editor of
German weekly Die Zeit, with reference to Merkel's mentor, former longtime
Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Named Time Magazine's Person of the Year in 2015,
Merkel oversaw Europe's absorption last year of the biggest influx of migrants
to the continent since World War Two, having only just steered the bloc through
the euro zone crisis.
"She is someone who finds satisfaction in all these
challenges," one official close to Merkel, speaking on condition of
anonymity, said of Lutheran pastor's daughter who grew up in communist East
Germany.
LIMITED LEVERAGE
Yet Merkel must do more than survive and muddle through if
she is to master the challenges a fourth term would bring. If she retains power
next year, as is widely expected, Merkel will need to galvanize the European
project at a time when the EU executive has embarked on a bitter row with
Berlin by pressing it to spend more to lift euro zone growth.
The push from Brussels, where Germany has tried to foist its
fiscal discipline on other EU members, signals the limits of Merkel's capacity
to lead in Europe, where her open-door migrant policy has proved especially unpopular
with eastern neighbors. "Merkel could not impose her will on the
distribution of refugees, nor on reform-minded fiscal discipline in Club
Med," said Joffe, referring to southern European EU members.
The fiscal policy row burgeons bigger geopolitical
pressures.
Britain's June 23 vote to leave the EU opens the way for a
country to leave the bloc for the first time. As Europe's most powerful leader,
Merkel must retain close ties with Britain without cutting a Brexit deal that
tempts others facing a sluggish economy and worries about immigration to leave
too.
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Trump cancels meeting with New York Times, complaining about
'nasty tone'. Record highs for Wall Street quartet send other stocks higher. "Europe
is in danger of falling apart," French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said in
Berlin on Thursday. "So Germany and France have a huge
responsibility."
The rise of Marine Le Pen's far-right National Front will
leave the next French president ruling over a deeply divided country that can
no longer play an equal role in the Franco-German tandem that has traditionally
driven Europe. More immediately, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi risks
losing a referendum on constitutional reform next month on which he has staked
his political future.
This leaves Germany as a reluctant hegemon at the center of
a fractured Europe into which Russia is seeking to project its power. Merkel
has said Moscow may try to influence Germany's 2017 elections through cyber
attacks and disinformation.
Germany's pacifist instincts and modest military
capabilities limit Merkel's ability to hold together the NATO alliance, whose
members Trump slammed during the U.S. election campaign for not paying enough
for their own defense.
Merkel massaged down expectations about what she can do. Announcing
her candidacy, she told reporters: "No person alone - even with the
greatest experience - can change things in Germany, Europe and the world for
the better, and certainly not the chancellor of Germany."
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