By Tony Czuczka and Leon Mangasarian
Three days before East and West Germany reunited in 1990, Angela Merkel made an acquaintance that was to put her on the path to power.
An East German scientist propelled into politics by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the communist regime’s collapse, Merkel wangled an audience with Helmut Kohl at a party event in Hamburg. Within four months, Kohl had ridden German reunification to a landslide third election victory and Merkel secured a post in his Cabinet.
Just as Kohl knew what Germans on both sides of the border wanted when they united 22 years ago, Merkel is tuned in to voters who balk at paying the price of the united Europe Kohl brought about. While her peers in France, Italy and Spain have been voted out in the three years since the debt crisis emerged in Greece, Merkel’s ability to channel domestic public opinion paired with a still-expanding economy led polling company Forsa to conclude that she looks unbeatable before 2013 elections.
“The crisis makes people rally behind Merkel,” Gerd Languth, a historian and professor of politics at the University of Bonn whose 2005 biography of the chancellor documents her meeting with Kohl, said by phone. “People see her as being on top of the issues and the only one who can solve the problems.”
Bucking the crisis that has unseated contemporaries including her ally French President Nicolas Sarkozy is shaping up to be the theme of Merkel’s campaign for the election due next fall. Its resonance with voters will determine whether she emulates Kohl and serves a third term. Outside the 17-nation euro area, British Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservatives trail the opposition Labour Party by as many as 10 percentage points as he pushes the deepest budget cuts since the second World War.
Voters credit Merkel for ensuring Germany is “the only economic safe haven in Europe,” Horst Teltschik, Kohl’s deputy chief of staff and a key adviser on German reunification, said in a telephone interview. “There are no other strong leaders in Europe.” Merkel is “the rock at the centre of the euro-crisis storm.”
Merkel’s speeches channel Germans’ historical aversion to debt and profligacy forged in the aftermath of two world wars and marry them to Kohl’s legacy of a more integrated Europe. She’s seen to be “holding the line on debt mutualization” while finding a “middle way” on Europe, said Langguth. Vilification of Merkel with headlines and placards comparing her with Hitler only makes Germans swing behind her, he said.
Merkel, 58, the key political player in nearly three years of crisis-fighting, is aided by an economy that has yet to bear the scars of the turmoil dealt to fellow euro members.
Buoyed by growth in China and the United States, Volkswagen, Daimler and BMW have so far proved resilient to the plunge in sales that has plagued European rivals such as Peugeot Citroen of France and Italy’s Fiat. Kuka of Augsburg, Europe’s biggest maker of assembly- line robots, raised its outlook for 2012 as it expands in China.
wP-Bloomberg
