Examples from domestic politics: What Merkel left behind

Merkel’s foreign policy balance sheet is currently getting considerable scratches as a result of the Afghanistan disaster. But the Chancellor is also leaving behind major construction sites on the domestic front.

Angela Merkel is unlikely to go down in history either as a digital visionary or as a climate chancellor. And it wasn’t enough for her to become a feminist either. Three examples from domestic politics – an overview.

Merkel and digitization

A long-running favorite in Merkel’s tenure is digitization. What the Chancellor promises has always sounded pretty much the same over the years: Germany must take advantage of the opportunities offered by digitization.

If you have a farm, people don’t come here today, they want a proper homepage with a three-dimensional representation of the leg of lamb. And if you write on it: Excuse me, I can’t show you, I’ll send you a photo in the mail, then you will soon not be there when the sale takes place.

Merkel said that back in 2010. The pace of digital change is enormous, but the Chancellor is doing too little to keep up. Merkel announces, promises, conjures up, and is even launching a digital council in 2018 – and yet: The mobile phone gaps remain, Germany is lagging behind in terms of artificial intelligence, and the expansion of digital administration is stalling.

FDP leader Christian Lindner comments critically in 2017:

Ms. Merkel said three and a half years ago: Internet, this is new territory. Now she is talking about how digitalization threatened us with becoming a developing country. We are not heading in the right direction, ladies and gentlemen.

After all, it is the corona pandemic that shakes Merkel awake at the end of her term of office in terms of digitization – and not only because the line to Merkel’s home office simply does not want to go through an important conference call.

Use the opportunities of digitization? Merkel said at her summer press conference in July of this year, “that we could and should be better. Sometimes things are going very slowly.”

Speaking of slow …

Merkel and the women

A Chancellor knows what power feels like. Many other women would like to know that too. Only in the era of Chancellor Angela Merkel it was such a thing with women in leadership positions. In May 2007, when Merkel had been in office for almost two years, the best-known representative of the German women’s movement, Alice Schwarzer, still sounded hopeful:

Women are pushing into all professions, we have a head of state – and so on. So it is really moving forward.

However, the Chancellor is not moving really fast. In 2016 the SPD presented a bill for more fair wages, Merkel hesitated and did not give the green light until 2017. In the same year, she also declares that she may just be a feminist:

If you think I am a (feminist) vote, okay. But I don’t want to adorn myself with this feather.

More women in power? Probably not with the Chancellor. Not in their own party, the CDU. And not in executive suites either. Merkel left things behind for a long time – including the idea of ​​introducing a statutory women’s quota of 30 percent for boards of directors and supervisory boards of large DAX companies. In 2011, then Minister of Labor Ursula von der Leyen, Merkel’s CDU party colleague, stated:

I just run out of patience with the promises of a voluntary movement. We’re running out of time.

Because everything remains voluntary at first, the company bosses do little at first. The statutory 30 percent quota for women on supervisory boards and executive boards of listed companies has only been in place since 2020. Incidentally, the word “women’s quota” does not appear in the Union’s current election manifesto. Looking back, Merkel says on this subject:

I would have imagined things to be easier when I went into politics in 1990, I have to say quite honestly.

But women’s politics was never really a matter close to Merkel’s heart. There could have been more.

Merkel and the climate

In the beginning there was a photo by the fjord: Angela Merkel and the then Federal Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel stand in thick red down jackets in front of a melting iceberg in Greenland. In 2007 Merkel is still the climate chancellor.

What I’m taking away is that we have events here that happened thousands of years ago, but which lasted ten thousand years back then. And the same thing will happen today in about 60 or 80 years.

And Sigmar Gabriel promises:

We will launch the largest climate and energy package in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany. It’s a real turnaround.

During the four Merkel cabinets, however, it looks like this: For years, the federal government has missed the climate targets it has set itself for reducing CO2 by crashing. 40 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions compared to 1990 – that won’t work until 2020, but only because less production and less travel will be made during the corona pandemic. The expansion of renewable energies is not progressing fast enough, although the last German nuclear power plant is to be shut down in 2022. But the last German coal-fired power plant will not be available for 17 years.

Luisa Neubauer from Fridays for Future is dissatisfied:

We urgently need ‘leaders’, i.e. people who lead the world and say they do it and, when in doubt, make really uncomfortable decisions.

Merkel had already warned of a climate catastrophe as Federal Environment Minister in the 1990s. Many national and international conferences and some climate agreements later, after almost 16 years as chancellor, Merkel now admits to the question of global warming:

Measured against the goal of staying well below an increase of 2 degrees Celsius or as close as possible to an increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius, not enough has happened.

At the end of the Merkel era, the first broadcast the documentary “Merkel Years” this evening after the Tagesschau at 8:15 pm.