Wolfgang Münchau Wolfgang Münchau

Angela’s ashes: Merkel is leaving the EU in chaos

Perhaps the most absurd thing ever said about Angela Merkel is that she was the de facto leader of the western world. She has certainly been one of Europe’s most successful politicians, if you define success as political survival. But as she comes to the end of her 16 years in office, her luck is deserting her and the mess she has created is becoming horribly apparent. She leaves behind a split EU that is not just unled but might now be unleadable.

Humiliating reminders of Merkel’s imploded authority come regularly. Take her latest idea to keep British tourists out of the EU this summer. Germany is imposing a mandatory 14-day quarantine for UK arrivals, whether they are vaccinated or not, and Merkel wanted other EU states to do the same. Malta and Portugal refused, saying only the unvaccinated should have to quarantine. Spain said it would not quarantine anyone who came with a negative test.

Merkel’s ban failed because it was not really about the virus but about the German elections. The nightmare scenario for her party, the Christian Democratic Union, is a rise of infections after the summer holidays but before the September election. It’s unclear how banning British tourists would help to suppress Covid. The Delta variant is moving fast through Europe. It makes up 20 per cent of cases in Spain and 40 per cent in Austria.

But the important point of this drama is that the EU member states are no longer bending over backwards to please Merkel, as they habitually did during the years of the sovereign debt crisis, when they happily (and tragically) followed Germany’s lead towards austerity. It’s now hard to persuade them to act as one.

‘I was told to stand in the corner and self-isolate.’

An even more stark sign of the deterioration of EU unity came last week when a Franco-German proposal for a summit with Vladimir Putin triggered one of the most ill-tempered disputes ever seen in European politics.

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