Merkel's EU Legacy Summit.

• Author: Engelen, Klaus C.

Angela Merkel is being praised around the world for her astute handling of the coronavirus crisis. Voters give the German chancellor her highest approval rating in years. And her center-right Christian Democrats are profiting from her popularity, reaching an approval rating of 40 percent, while her coalition partner, the Social Democrats, lingers at around 15 percent.

Elected chancellor in November 2005, Merkel will step down after next year's national elections. She will end a three-decade political career, half of which will have been served as head of government with different coalitions.

In July 2020, Germany assumed the presidency of the Council of the European Union, which means that until December 2020, Germany will chair the meetings of the Council and will be responsible for progress on EU legislation. Merkel will thus play a key role on the Brussels stage, especially during the final phase of the negotiations and implementation of the coming 2021-2027 budget and the new Recovery Fund.

The editors of Euractiv offer an interesting analysis: "If one had to name a day on which Merkel took up the fight for her legacy as a European shaper, it would have been 18 May when she and French President Emmanuel Macron proposed that the twenty-seven EU member states should, for the first time, take on debt together to tackle the crisis."

On that day, Euractiv argues, Europe was confronted with two new realities. First, the Franco-German axis, once the engine of European integration, was back. Second, Germany went from being a savings champion to a major donor.

This move by Merkel will have a political cost in coming regional and national elections, helping the right-wing Alternative fur Deutschland and weakening the CDU/CSU. When her SPD coalition partner and Finance Minister Olaf Scholz, next year's SPD candidate for chancellor, greeted the joint debt financing of the coronavirus recovery fund as "irreversible progress for Germany and the EU," Merkel immediately countered. She insisted that the EU summit decision was an "exceptional agreement."

Even highly respected CDU veteran Wolfgang Schauble, former finance minister and current president of the Bundestag, backed Merkel's U-turn on joint debt at the EU level, softening the blow to her disappointed conservative party members.

However, one thing is certain: Using joint EU debt to finance EU projects has no legal basis in the Treaties of the European Union. Those in Germany who challenged the...