How do Germans view Angela Merkel's legacy?

Germany's former Chancellor Angela Merkel has been retired for around two and a half years. Now, the pollster YouGov surveyed a representative sample of 2,300 people in Germany.

Sixty-one percent said the country's situation has deteriorated since Merkel left office. When asked about the reasons for this, 28% said that the "bad government" of the current center-left government was to blame.

The coalition of center-left Social Democrats (SPD), environmentalist Greens and neoliberal Free Democrats (FDP) succeeded Merkel's grand coalition government of center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU)/Christian Social Union (CSU) and the SPD took over after the general election in 2021. Only a quarter of those polled said that living conditions in Germany had remained more or less the same since then.

Merkel's sobriety and pragmatism

It is not known whether Angela Merkel knows about this survey, but she is surely aware successors had and still have to deal with severe crises: Russia's war against Ukraine, the resulting inflation, high energy prices and the Israel-Hamas war in the Middle East. Add to that the ever-increasing polarization of society, right-wing populism throughout Europe, crippling bureaucracy and the country's broken infrastructure.

Merkel was notoriously pragmatic and unemotional during her 16 years as head of the German government from 2005 to 2021. Since her voluntary departure, Merkel has largely made herself scarce — just as she said she would.

She was the first head of government in post-war Germany to leave office of her own accord and simply not stand for reelection in 2021. And she is the first who apparently really doesn't need the limelight.

Nevertheless, many people are thinking of her and congratulating her  on her 70th birthday — like Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who served twice in Merkel's government as Foreign Minister for his party, the SPD.

In his official birthday greeting, Steinmeier praised Merkel as a "role model and a hallmark of our democracy."

What is special about her, he said, is that Merkel's life can be divided almost exactly into two phases: "The first 35 years until the fall of the Berlin Wall. And the second 35 years in the longed-for freedom," said the head of state.

He continued: "It was always important to you to emphasize the value of freedom and an enlightened society. Your arguments were so convincing because you knew all the better from your own experience the inestimable value of living in a liberal democracy."

Angela Merkel's career began after the Fall of the Wall

Merkel has always been confronted with her origins in the former communist-ruled East Germany, the German Democratic Republic (GDR). She was a physicist and rather removed from politics, only to find her way into politics during the exciting period of change after November 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, much later than the mostly male politicians from West Germany. This becomes apparent in a new, five-part documentary by public broadcaster ARD entitled: "The Fateful Years of a Female Chancellor."

In it, Merkel herself recounts how she moved into an apartment in a dilapidated house in East Berlin in 1984, on her 30th birthday. Her first marriage had just failed. Her father, a pastor, came to visit. "He looked around and instead of congratulating me, he said: You haven't come very far yet," Merkel recounted 40 years later.

The same can hardly be said for the following years. Merkel's path from deputy press spokeswoman for the first freely elected GDR prime minister to federal environment minister in reunited Germany to the long era of her chancellorship seems fabulous, almost unreal. A career that could probably only have begun in this way during the years of reunification of the two German states.

Mistakes of the Merkel years

Since her retirement, Merkel has only appeared in public from time to time, sometimes quite surprisingly, like in May of this year, at a reception marking the retirement of former Environment Minister Jürgen Trittin of the Green Party, a politician with whom she had little to do during her active time. A meeting between Merkel and former US President Barack Obama in Berlin in May 2023 made at least a few headlines. Otherwise, we hear that Merkel is busy writing her memoirs, due to be published later this year.

Merkel is largely alienated from her party, the CDU, and has not attended any of the party conferences since December 2021. On her birthday, current deputy parliamentary group leader Jens Spahn paid tribute to Merkel's legacy, but in an interview with news magazine Focus, he also named what he described as three of her major mistakes.

"The mass irregular migration since 2015 has destabilized and overwhelmed German society," began the former Health Minister.

Mistake number two? "We should have dealt with Putin's Russia very differently from 2014 [Russia's annexation of Crimea] at the latest."

According to Spahn, the third mistake was phasing out nuclear energy after the 2011 disaster in Fukushima.

If you ask representatives of the current coalition government, many will say that Merkel's time in government was characterized by continuity, based on the firm belief that as little change as possible was to be imposed on the country. This, they say, means that changes now have to be made in a rush: digitalization, the energy transition, tackling the shortage of skilled workers. And in a world facing a mounting threat of nationalism, Germany sees itself forced to quickly learn to defend itself, also militarily.

But even Merkel's political rivals, such as current Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck of the Greens, still find very favorable words for the woman who led the country through the euro currency and financial crisis as well as the coronavirus pandemic. In June, Habeck wrote about Merkel in the German edition of Rolling Stone magazine that he could always imagine her sitting at home peeling potatoes or watching TV crime dramas. This was obviously meant as a compliment, illustrating Merkel's aversion to any form of vanity.

This article was originally written in German.

While you're here: Every Tuesday, DW editors round up what is happening in German politics and society. You can sign up here for the weekly email newsletter Berlin Briefing.