Angela Merkel and Orban: It has never been your Merkel

The former chancellor in a crimson blazer, the president in a dark blue suit and below them the Danube with beautiful Budapest as if pictured. So there stood Angela Merkel with Viktor Orbán and telegenically rejoiced at the reunion.

Merkel was in Budapest to present the Hungarian translation of her memoirs. And because she was just there, she also stopped by her old friend Viktor. She also gave an interview in which she reported that at the end of her term in office, the Poles and Balts had rejected the proposal for a new format of talks with the Russians – and that after that, well, the war began.

No, she was not, as Pis and Bild subsequently claimed, making the Poles complicit in the war, especially since she had not expressed this view of historical matters for the first time. But her choice of words sounded like an insinuation.

Since then, her CDU, many former voters and the political features section have been asking anxious questions: What is going on with Merkel? Why does she say something like that? And why does she needlessly hit a potentate who controls the media, persecutes migrants and, in his own words, has established an “illiberal democracy”?

The liberal bourgeoisie in particular is alienated. It no longer brings the former Chancellor together with the old Chancellor. An example of the diffuse uneasiness is: “Is that still our Merkel?”

The only answer that comes to mind is this: It was never your Merkel! – by the way, just as she was not the Merkel of Kohl or the CDU. Instead, she always remained, at least at her core, the pastor’s daughter Angela Kasner, who was born in Hamburg and grew up in Templin, was at the top of her class and had everyone written off, who belonged to the FDJ and did not join the SED, who read Reiner Kunze and learned Russian in Donetsk. She lived half in the system and half on its periphery. Like most of the inmates of the GDR, she had settled into a niche between adaptation and isolation, skeptical of any ideology.

Angela Merkel thus represents the inner contradictions of East German character. Nevertheless, she expressly did not want to be Merkel of the East Germans, at least not as an active politician. Like many new German citizens, she believed she had to cover up her background in order to be able to pursue a career.

Only shortly before the end of her term in office, on October 3, 2021, in an exceptionally great speech, did Merkel indicate the humiliation that her existence sometimes brought with it. Even in the highest government office, she still seemed like a career changer who didn’t fit into the party political mold.

She wasn’t alone in that. Like all GDR people who ended up in politics in 1989, she first had to put together a new world view. Rather by chance, after her spontaneous entry into the citizen-driven “Democratic Awakening”, she ended up in the CDU, where she, the East German, 35-year-old woman with the ridiculed hairstyle, had to achieve in just a few years what other decades in the Young Union had time for.

Her skills included the natural sciences, some everyday Russian and the experience of a dictatorship that imploded within weeks of the self-empowerment of a few tens of thousands of people. In addition, and what makes Merkel a special East German, was the Christian view of humanity that her father had preached when he tried to reconcile the church and real socialism.

All of this was rarely understood by West German politicians. This is also why they underestimated Merkel, regardless of whether their names were Helmut Kohl, Wolfgang Schäuble or Friedrich Merz. They were amazed at how, as opposition leader, she was first the neoliberal and then the social democrat, how, as chancellor, she first extended the operating times of nuclear power plants and then cut them even further – and how, as leader of the CDU, she first condemned multiculturalism and then left the borders open. Their conclusion: Merkel has no compass and is only concerned about maintaining her own power. (If the gentlemen themselves, like Merz recently, changed their positions diametrically, that was of course necessary realpolitik.)

But I don’t want to be Angela Merkel’s explainer here, and certainly not her apologists. I find her flirting with Orban just as unfortunate as her increasing self-righteousness. In addition, I hardly know Merkel from personal encounters, but mainly from public appearances and what was reported about her and by her.

But I know myself and many East Germans. And I know another pastor’s daughter who was at the top of her class and in the FDJ. She went as a GDR pastor in the SED-affiliated block CDU, only to be swept into the West German Union in 1990, where she served with great flexibility, friendly empathy, but also cunning toughness in the state cabinet, parliament and party until she suddenly found herself in the Erfurt State Chancellery in 2009, when the Thuringian CDU was in its worst crisis to date.

Christine Lieberknecht, that’s the woman’s name, became the CDU’s first female Prime Minister in this way, which is why I even wrote about her. She was always suspected of being a social democrat or even a leftist because she called Bodo Ramelow her boyfriend.

The politician Lieberknecht was just about what the politician Merkel was: pragmatic, non-ideological and yes, quite flexible, but always within a Christian and partly conservative range of values ​​that was formed in the GDR. This corridor of values ​​also included the ability to speak in all directions, with extremism as the boundary line.

Just like Merkel, who, as she once promised, is “close” to the CDU, the accidental Christian Democrat Lieberknecht has always gotten along well with social democrats, leftists and greens, and yes, even with right-wing conservatives. For decades, its spokesman was a clever man who had published in ultra-right-wing newspapers and was a member of the German Guild. Later, when she was already retired, she supported Hans-Georg Maaßen’s unsuccessful Thuringian CDU federal election campaign and appeared at the Union of Values. Everything that is “within the framework of the constitution” must be accepted, she said, but that doesn’t mean at all that she agrees with everything the candidate says.

With the same nonchalance with which the former Prime Minister meandered between the opposites of Ramelow and Maaßen, the former Chancellor moves between a Jürgen Trittin, at whose political farewell party she spoke, and a Viktor Orbán.

But that doesn’t make her Merkel by a long shot. But always just: Angela Merkel.