Katja Hoyer Katja Hoyer

How will Merkel cope with retirement?

Retirement sounds pretty nice. The ONS says that pensioners spend an average of seven hours and ten minutes a day on leisure activities. Over seven hours. That’s a lot of time for nice things. Yet the prospect of retirement can bring a certain dread. According to a YouGov survey, only around half of people about to retire look forward to it. The reality of having nothing to do is as terrifying as it is thrilling.

So how do you feel when you have not held any old job, but one that kept you busy 24/7, one that let you meet hundreds of people every day and one that gave you an enormous sense of purpose? Angela Merkel faces that prospect. She has been the German chancellor for 16 years. No time for hobbies, no time for idle thoughts, no time for herself.

Yes, Merkel went on holiday trips with her husband Joachim Sauer. But a ‘holiday’ for the chancellor only meant no official appointments for three weeks. She could never switch her phone off and relax. When she travelled to her favourite holiday destinations such as South Tyrol for hiking, her phone could ring at any moment to call the holiday to an abrupt end.

One category of politicians Angela Merkel should certainly not look to for inspiration are former British Prime Ministers

But Merkel had a life before her chancellorship, an often forgotten fact given her now seeming omnipresence. Her studies as a quantum chemist is where she met her husband. After the Berlin Wall, she was elected to the Bundestag in 1990, rising to first minister only a year later as Helmut Kohl took her under his wing. The promotions never abated, culminating in her ascension to the chancellorship in 2005. Even her critics would agree that it is a job she has fully devoted herself to.

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