Angela Merkel and her Christian Democrats should have been the winner in the September 24 German elections. The national unemployment rate is 3.7 percent and the economic growth is 2 percent. But Merkel now faces the biggest political impasse in Germany since 1949 with difficulties in forming a new coalition.
The question is: who is Angela Merkel?
Unlike her Christian Democratic predecessors, Chancellor Merkel has no crosses hanging on the walls of her office. She is the daughter of a Protestant pastor from the period when there was an East Germany. She never talks about “values” in public. She is the perfect mirror of a skeptical and post-Christian continent where faith has been totally privatised.
Merkel has no children. Neither do most of Europe’s current leaders. To mention some, the prime ministers of Italy, Netherlands, Sweden, UK and the French President Emammuel Macron have no chlldren either.
“If the Germans don’t have children, does it matter who inherits their country?”, asked David Goldman in the Asia Times. “Why not their house pets?”.
Merkel is a cunning politician personifying a cynical mixture of wealthy multiculturalism and moral relativism. Merkel allowed the Bundestag to vote on gay marriage, despite her party’s contrary opinion. She did it only for electoral reasons – to deprive the Social Democrats of a big reason to gain votes.
Merkel never joined the Western efforts to defeat Islamic terrorism. She commands the world’s fourth largest economy and Europe’s financial giant, but her country is a military dwarf, weak and disarmed. For Merkel, sending fighting troops abroad, even to defeat ISIS, always looked unthinkable.
Merkel’s former foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, even made the withdrawal of American nuclear weapons from Germany one of his top priorities. Merkel has also been crucial in the political ransom Turkey’s Erdogan has been able to deploy in the migrants crisis, one of the most important factors in causing chaos on the continent since the Second World War.
Merkel’s open door policy is the product of two factors: the German declining birth rates of the last 40 years, a collective demographic suicide, and the permanent sense of guilt for the Holocaust, for the right moral reasons but the wrong political goals.
Karl Lagerfeld, the creative director of Chanel and Fendi, during the French television show Salut les Terriens just criticized Merkel for allowing one million migrants to enter the country in 2015.
“One cannot — even if there are decades between them — kill millions of Jews so you can bring millions of their worst enemies in their place”, Lagerfeld said. He cited an anecdote in support of his assumptions that Jewish people and refugees are at odds. “I know someone in Germany who took a young Syrian in and after four days he said, ‘The greatest thing Germany invented was the Holocaust,’” he said. Lagerfeld also suggested that Merkel felt she needed to take in more migrants in 2015 to counteract the image she was given as “the wicked stepmother in the story of the Greek [financial] crisis”.
Merkel is the daughter of the German unity that arose after the fall of Berlin Wall, the protégé of Helmut Kohl. “The reunification of Germany was the last big goal for Germans” said Gustav Gressel, a defence expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “After that everyone fell into this ‘end of history’ feeling – everything is good, we’re all friends and it has to stay that way”.
The Germans feel they must atone for their past deeds and their present wealth by embracing a post-national, post-Christian and post-heroic Western model.
Greg Sheridan of The Australian was right when he called Merkel “the chief agent of Europe’s demise”. But she is more than that. My friend Henryk Broder, the German Jewish journalist, said that Germany has committed to “disappear” from history.
At the time of Western twilight, Angela Merkel is the perfect administrator working for her own downfall.
Article source: https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-1.825582
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