Merkel, Germany and Europe: Sixteen Years of Missed Opportunities

Anyone assessing Angela Merkel’s sixteen years in office cannot avoid three concepts: Merkel, Germany and Europe. From 2005 to 2021, Merkel was regarded as the calm, rational leader who safely guided her country through every crisis. But behind that façade of stability, structural problems continued to accumulate. Merkel, Germany and, by extension, Europe too often chose delay over reform, cheap energy over geopolitical security, and crisis management over a vision for the future. The bill for those choices only became apparent after she left office.

Merkel’s great political talent was managing the present. Her weakness was preparing for the future. That distinction is essential. During her chancellorship, Germany developed into an economic heavyweight with a low-wage, export-oriented economy, while unemployment remained relatively low.

16 years Chancellor Merkel left Germany in ruins

That should not be denied. However, the foundations for this were laid by the left-wing Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who implemented structural reforms.

It was precisely the prosperity of the Merkel years that offered a historic opportunity to thoroughly modernize infrastructure, defence, energy supply and the digital economy. That opportunity was barely used. Independent analyses of Merkel’s legacy have likewise pointed to inadequate technological and infrastructure modernisation.

Defence under Merkel and Minister Ursula von der Leyen was also all but dismantled, even as Putin’s Russia had been invading neighbouring countries since 2005.

Finally, Merkel opened Germany’s borders wide to migrants from the Islamic world, with all the resulting problems of crime and terrorism.

The euro: crisis contained, problem unresolved

During the euro crisis, Merkel presented herself as the guardian of financial discipline. Greece and other Southern European countries were required to reform and cut spending in exchange for European support. Under German leadership, emergency mechanisms were established to keep eurozone countries experiencing financial difficulties afloat.

This saved the euro, but the fundamental weaknesses of the monetary union did not disappear. A monetary union without a fully fledged political and fiscal union remained in place, while debt levels, competitiveness and economic development continued to vary significantly among member states. Critics also accuse Merkel of deepening European divisions through the harsh treatment of Greece, while France, simply because it was France, was allowed to continue spending money it did not have without implementing any meaningful socioeconomic reforms.

Thus emerged a pattern that became characteristic of Merkel, Germany and Europe: preventing a crisis from exploding today without answering the question of how the same crisis could be structurally prevented tomorrow.

Russia: trade was confused with security

Nowhere were the consequences more serious than in relations with Russia. For years, Germany clung to the idea that economic interdependence would ultimately turn Moscow into a predictable partner. Even after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, Germany’s fundamental energy policy did not change.

The closure of all German nuclear power plants and the construction of Nord Stream became symbols of this strategic error. Merkel attended the commissioning of the first Nord Stream gas pipeline in 2011 and spoke at the time of a reliable partnership with Russia. It later became clear just how vulnerable Germany’s dependence on Russian gas had made the country. In retrospect, experts have identified allowing this one-sided energy dependency as a major political failure.

Warnings also came from Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic states and the United States. Throughout this period, Merkel’s government in Berlin treated Nord Stream as an economic project, even though it also had geopolitical significance for Moscow.

Defence: the peace dividend was collected for too long

The same short-term thinking affected the Bundeswehr. In 2011, under Merkel, conscription was suspended and the armed forces were further transformed into an all-volunteer military.

A professional military does not necessarily have to be a weak military. The problem was that, at the same time, Germany failed to invest sufficiently in equipment, stockpiles and operational readiness. Merkel herself later acknowledged that much still needed to be done to equip the Bundeswehr with modern capabilities.

Here too, we see the broader problem involving Merkel, Germany and Europe. Germany benefited from the free American security umbrella and from a relatively peaceful Europe, but did virtually nothing to prepare itself for the moment when those assumptions might no longer hold. This was despite it already being clear that countries such as Russia, Iran and China regarded the West as an enemy.

Energiewende: idealism without sufficient strategic reserves

Following Fukushima, Merkel decided in 2011 to phase out nuclear power in Germany. At the same time, Germany invested heavily in wind and solar energy. The climate ambitions behind this were already difficult to understand, but combining them with dependence on Russian gas made the policy even more strategically risky.

A more sensible energy policy would have combined climate targets with security of supply, affordability and geopolitical independence. Nuclear power is climate-neutral.

Nuclear power, supplemented by oil and gas, wind and solar energy, should have been treated as components of a single security strategy. Instead, Germany created a system in which its industrial model depended heavily on imported Russian energy and stable international relations. Nuclear power plants provided reliable, cheap and clean energy. Germany has now become the biggest polluter through its burning of coal and imports of gas and oil.

When the assumption of cheap, clean energy collapsed, the vulnerability of Merkel’s policies became apparent in practice.

The country of engineers missed the digital revolution

Perhaps the most painful criticism of Merkel’s economic policies is that Germany failed to modernize sufficiently during a period of enormous prosperity. While the United States produced technology companies such as Google, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft, and later major AI platforms, and China built its own digital industry, Germany continued to rely on cars, machinery and chemicals, the champions of the twentieth century.

Merkel herself acknowledged that Germany lagged behind in digital government services and that digitalisation and 5G urgently needed to be developed. Her famous 2013 remark that the internet was still Neuland -uncharted territory -for many people therefore became a symbol of a country whose technological capabilities were beginning to lag behind its industrial reputation. Other European countries have super-fast internet and digital economies, while Germany still uses fax machines.

Merkel, Germany and therefore Europe spent too long protecting the existing economic model instead of aggressively investing in software, cloud technology, semiconductors, digital infrastructure and new businesses.

Physical infrastructure, including roads and railways, was also severely neglected under Merkel. German trains suffer endless delays, motorways were not widened and are full of potholes, bridges need replacing, and the opening of Berlin’s new airport was an extraordinary construction fiasco.

Migration: humanitarianism without a convincing long-term strategy

Then there is Merkel’s most controversial decision: the 2015 migration crisis. More than a million refugees and migrants reached Germany during the period in which Merkel refused to close the border. Her phrase “Wir schaffen das” (“We will manage this”) became a worldwide symbol of her policy.

That policy was based on humanitarian considerations that must be taken seriously.

Many people were genuinely fleeing the war in Syria, but they did not necessarily have to be accommodated in Europe.

A large number of newcomers, particularly from Syria, did not support Assad but ISIS, and these people entered Europe without any checks whatsoever. As a result, cities and federal states initially came under severe pressure, while the anti-immigration AfD gained political momentum.

The problem, therefore, was not simply “Islam” or the arrival of foreigners. The political problem was that large-scale immigration was insufficiently linked to external border control, selection, rapid asylum procedures, reception in the region, return policies, integration and an open discussion about cultural tensions. Humanitarianism without manageability ultimately undermines society’s support for humanitarianism itself.

The price of sixteen years of stability

Angela Merkel was an incompetent chancellor. Her tactical political abilities were exceptionally poor, and yet she was praised by many.

That is the paradox of her legacy: she was particularly good at stabilizing crises and far less successful at preventing the next one. She completely lacked strategic insight and pursued ad hoc policies out of pure political opportunism.

The euro remained vulnerable, defence was severely neglected, Russia was completely underestimated, energy policy was disconnected from geopolitical strategy, digitalisation fell dramatically behind, and migration divided society to its core. Even the current German government now speaks of geopolitical, economic and demographic risks that were underestimated for years, as well as the need to modernise defence, the economy, energy and digitalisation, and is no longer capable of reversing the consequences of sixteen years of Merkel’s mismanagement.

The history of Merkel, Germany and Europe therefore deserves a far more critical assessment than the conventional image of sixteen calm years under “Mutti.”

Merkel gave Germany a false sense of stability at a time when the economy was doing well. But political leadership is ultimately not judged solely by the problems managed during a leader’s term in office. It is also judged by the problems left behind for their successors.

And that legacy is proving particularly costly.

Image credits: Angelo Abear via Unsplash