Angela’s demons

Bankruptcy, wrote Ernest Hemingway, happens in two ways — ‘gradually and then suddenly’. By now, Angela Merkel will be beginning to fear that her remarkable career is about to move into that second motion. Barely a year ago, she was being talked about as the leader of the free world. Now she is blamed by her own party for upending German politics and, in the process, allowing the far-right to become a real political force for the first time since the 1940s. The cover of Der Spiegel, Germany’s main weekly, last week summed it up in one word: ‘Crisis.’

It’s a crisis that’s been intensifying for some time. It began when the federal elections last September delivered the worst result for Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union since 1949 — a result so abysmal she was lucky not to be ousted. That may yet happen. There is growing ‘Merkel fatigue’ in the country and her centrist theology — Merkelism — is seen as a cause, not a remedy, for the current malaise.