Germany's Deceptive Calm: The Hidden Rifts in Merkel's Consensus
February 2015 report by Paul Hockenos, Germany's Deceptive Calm: The Hidden Rifts in Merkel's Consensus.
Germany's Deceptive Calm: The Hidden Rifts in Merkel's Consensus
By Paul Hockenos, Feb. 3, 2015
On
the surface, today’s Germany appears a model of harmony and consensus.
Led by Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is beloved by the citizenry,
Germany boasts the eurozone’s strongest economy, which has flourished
even during the financial crisis and Europe-wide recession. Merkel, 60,
heads up the country’s most popular party, the Christian Democratic
Union (CDU), and has no serious challenger in sight. The current “grand
coalition,” elected in 2013, is an affable partnership with the
center-left Social Democrats; the trade unions and industry get along
well, too. Many experts and journalists, such as George Packer in a recent profile in The New Yorker,
envision Merkel’s reign—already in its 10th year—enduring well into the
future, perhaps even outlasting those of her eminent conservative
predecessors, Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Kohl.
Many
observers, including Packer, label Merkel as visionless and
risk-adverse, a benevolent caretaker gently guiding a Germany set on
autopilot. Yet in doing so, they overlook her historic role as an
energetic modernizer of German—and indeed European—Christian democracy,
as well as the deep rifts that this course has opened up in Germany. At a
time when conservatism in some countries, from the United States to
Hungary, looks ever more retrograde,
Merkel has incrementally sculpted a conservatism fit for the 21st
century. It is, however, exactly this feat that divides German
conservatives. Many of the most relevant fault lines in the Federal
Republic today run straight through the CDU and its Bavarian sister
party, the Christian Social Union (CSU). These and other divisions—over
the eurozone, for instance—threaten the social consensus Merkel has
built.
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