LETTER FROM BERLIN: An Impressive Failure Angela Merkel bows out.

• Author: Engelen, Klaus C.

On October 29, 2018, a day after the Christian Democrats in the State of Hesse suffered doubledigit election losses, German Chancellor Angela Merkel told a meeting of the CDU executive council that she would not stand again as candidate to head her party. She later went before the national press and explained that she intended to stay on as chancellor until 2021 when her term ran out and would not stand for another seat in the Bundestag, nor aspire to any other political position.

"Angela Merkel is the first postwar German chancellor who managed to succeed where most politicians fail: to end her extraordinary career at a time of her own choosing, neither failing at the ballot box nor being pushed out by impatient internal rivals," notes Henning Hoff from Internationale Politik Quarterly.

Merkel led and shaped the party for eighteen years. Only Helmut Kohl served longer as head of the CDU. But when making the decision to end her extraordinary political career--with three decades as a member of the Bundestag and winning four national elections for her conservative Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union--Merkel probably did not anticipate such a turbulent and bitter end to her long chancellorship. Admired at times as the most powerful woman leader in the world, her record of managing to stay on top of so many crises and upheavals didn't help her in the end.

MERKEL WARNS OF LEFTIST COALITION

On September 7, 2021, when the German parliament held its last session prior to the federal elections, Merkel for the first time abandoned her position above the campaign fray. She sharply attacked her Social Democrat deputy and finance minister Olaf Scholz, who was leading in the polls. Apparently deeply worried that the CDU's Armin Laschet, governor of North Rhine-Westphalia, wouldn't catch up before election day a few weeks later, Merkel pitched for her center-right candidate as standing for "stability, reliability, moderation, and centrality." She appealed to the voters: "Either there is a government consisting of the SPD and the Greens, who accept support by the Left or at least don't rule it out, or a government led by CDU and CSU under a Chancellor Armin Laschet, a government that leads our country into the future with moderation."

As the analysts at Eurointelligence pointed out before the election, "The German electorate faces an unusual dilemma in these elections that could end up producing shifts beyond statistical error margins. A majority wants Olaf Scholz to be chancellor, but they also reject a red-red-green coalition, a coalition option Scholz needs to keep...