[music]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now we're going to ask what is Angela Merkel's place in history? How important to democracy. how important to the world not just her country of Germany as she gets ready to leave office, and what do we learn about any of this from the election that took place yesterday? Preliminary results show that Olaf Scholz, the candidate for the center-left Social Democratic Party, is gaining 25.7% of the vote, about a quarter of the vote. Armin Laschet, the candidate for the right-leaning Christian Democratic Union and Christian Social Union, got 24% of the votes so they're about tied.

While both candidates are hoping to govern, in German politics, these close numbers call for a coalition government negotiation. It looks like, ironically, the Green Party is going to have more influence than before and the libertarian party is going to have more influence than before sort of on the other side from the Greens like in this country. After 16 years as chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel is stepping away from politics and a global stage on which he was generally well-liked. She was close to President George W Bush. She was close to President Obama.

We know that President Trump saw her as the symbol of everything that was wrong with Europe and what we usually consider our allies and the democratic west. Let's talk about the legacy of Angela Merkel and the election that was held yesterday with Rob Schmitz, NPR's international correspondent based in Berlin. Rob, thanks for joining us for a little one-on-one time on only one little NPR affiliate instead of the hundreds you're on every time you do a story. Hi.

Rob Schmitz: [laughs] I'm thrilled to be on this NPR affiliate. I love WNYC. Thanks for having me on the program, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Angela Merkel, she came from East Germany, right?

Rob Schmitz: That's right.

Brian Lehrer: Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, before the fall of communism. How did that shape what kind of leader she was in a democratic Germany?

Rob Schmitz: I think it had a lot to do with how she ruled and the way that she engaged with other politicians. She grew up the daughter of a Lutheran pastor who was actually this pastor brought her there when she was quite young to East Germany from West Germany. He had purposely brought his family to the East at the time, which was very rare and she grew up--

Brian Lehrer: Where in part because officially East Germany was an atheist country, right?

Rob Schmitz: That's exactly right, which also had a lot to do with why he went there. I think this had a pretty profound impact on Merkel's upbringing. She talks about it a lot or she has talked about it a lot in speeches about how it shaped her. I've spoken to her biographers who tell me that the way that she was brought up in the former East Germany behind the Iron Curtain where everything was political, where you didn't know who was informing the Stasi, you didn't know who worked for whom, you felt like you were always being surveilled.

It meant that she went through life with a lot of caution and that she spoke very carefully. This followed her all the way from her childhood to when she became a scientist, a quantum chemist, a PhD in quantum chemistry, and then when she engaged in politics starting in her 30s after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. She used this approach, this very cautious listening more than talking approach in her leadership as Germany's chancellor for 16 years.

Brian Lehrer: It's a too obscure question to ask how being a PhD in quantum chemistry might have affected what kind of chancellor she was. It's such a rare background for someone who becomes a head of state.

Rob Schmitz: It is. That's right. I think that when you grew up in East Germany, there were a lot of folks who wanted to become politicians or wanted to become artists or musicians or other things that the state itself was limiting or regulating that they went into other fields like science. In fact, I spoke to one of her main colleagues at the academy of sciences in East Germany, Michael Schindhelm, who later became a filmmaker and writer after he had a PhD in the same field in the quantum chemistry.

In some ways, it was a function of East Germany, but I think also her background in the sciences has helped her tremendously with leading this country and also with listening to others, with taking a scientific, analytical approach to every social problem that she looks at. Also, in this latest crisis that we've seen in Europe and elsewhere, the COVID-19 pandemic.

This was something that she understood immediately as leader of Germany. She understood the ramifications and she basically talked to Germans during those first weeks as a scientist. She said, "Look, we're probably going to have this around for the next two years. This many people will probably die from it." It was really hard to listen to that, but in the end, she was correct

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, if you have ties to Germany, what'd you think of Angela Merkel as she gets ready to exit public life, or at least stepped down as chancellor after 16 years? 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280, or tweet @BrianLehrer. Has she been important? Not just to Germany as a country, though you can call about that if you want, but also to the idea of the West in these 32 years, since the fall of communism? 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280.

If you have any tie to Germany or just want to say something about Angela Merkel as she departs public life with Rob Schmitz correspondent based in Berlin for NPR. Rob, I'm thinking about the bookends, if you will, and they're not exactly equal so I don't mean bookends in that sense but of the fall of communism in 1989, including in East Germany, the triumphalism of the United States, and some other Western countries at that time.

The disappointing results of democracy in some countries, including Russia itself which I think has allowed people to allow backsliding. Then the rise of Trumpism which, if not trying to be authoritarian itself which arguably it was, was building instead of a Western democracies alliance, was building an alliance of authoritarian leaders who were friendly to the other authoritarian leaders. I'm curious where you see Angela Merkel in that arc of history.

Rob Schmitz: I think Merkel will be seen after she leaves. I think she's seen now too in a sense as someone as a leader who has really kept a light, this torch of democracy for the West and the Western world. Before the 2017 elections in Germany, it was the last elections that we had here, she had decided that she wanted to step down at that point but then according to people in her inner circle, she thought better of it after the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States in 2016.

Part of the reason of course was because she felt that at that point in her career, she was basically upholding this ideal of a neoliberal society in the West, and she was making a good go of it by keeping the EU together as much as possible.

Brian Lehrer: Wow. Yet she was controversial in the EU for, I think, tell me if I'm remembering this wrong or characterizing it incorrectly, being too much of a power-monger on behalf of the wealthy European countries, Germany, France, et cetera, within the EU at the expense of those who were having a financial crisis a few years ago, Greece and some of the others.

Rob Schmitz: Yes. I think at that time, you're talking about the financial crisis following the Lehman Brothers collapse of the US economy, the recession that followed that in 2008, 2009. Of course, that had huge ramifications on Europe's economy, and then suddenly we saw that the entire Eurozone was under threat. That there were countries, especially Greece, that were not being as fiscally responsible as they probably should have been and were in danger of pulling down the entire EU with them. At that time, that was one of her first and biggest challenges as Germany's chancellor.

She at first was not too thrilled about the prospect of bailing out Greece with German money. Of course, politically, this was nightmarish for her as well because of course Germans were also not thrilled about that prospect. Greece also was definitely interested in Germany helping it get out of this hole. In the end, she did decide to bail out Greece with a lot of money from Germany and the richer European countries because she believed that the EU needed to stick together and to hold together through the horrible financial crisis.

Brian Lehrer: She got enough political support from the people of the wealthier countries including her own to go forward with that.

Rob Schmitz: She did at the time, but it wasn't a very popular decision in Germany. She has done this a couple of times as chancellor. The second time she made a very unpopular move came about six years later in 2015 as the Syria crisis was unfolding. There were hundreds of thousands of migrants from Syria, Iraq, all over North Africa coming into Europe.

They were stuck at borders.

She made a very bold decision to let them come and resettle here in Germany and Germany ended up taking more than a million migrants within the span of a couple of years, which was a very big deal for this country. Now we look back at it, that's six years ago, that was an extremely unpopular decision for many in Germany who did not want so much immigration. It led in some ways to Brexit and it also led in many ways to the rise of the far-right throughout Europe and in Germany itself.

Brian Lehrer: Trump was elected the next year on his Muslim ban among other anti-immigration platforms. Emily in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Emily.

Emily: Brian, it's an honor to be on your show. You're fantastic. I lived in Paris, France for 12 years during the reign, so to speak, of Angela Merkel so I don't have an experience directly with Germany. I just wanted to point out how the political spectrum has shifted in the course of her tenure. She was a deeply right-wing politician. She was a Christian democrat. There was nothing progressive about Angela Merkel. She behaved, as your guest was saying, extraordinarily well in the crisis of the Syrian immigrant refugees and was very unpopular for it. She behaved well, I feel, in response to the presidency so-called of Trump, but she was a right-wing politician.

I raise this only because I think the spectrum has shifted so far to the right in the course of the last 15, 20 years that we get rather stunning perspectives on her. She behaved well in those particular instances, but of course, she was opposed to the idea of bailing out Greece. A friend of mine who lives in New York described her to me in a recent conversation as a progressive.

Angela Merkel was not a progressive, this is not progressive politics. This is deeply based in anti-communism. That was her heritage as you rightly pointed out. I just think that we need to understand that the shape of the world has shifted in such a way that it's actually possible for people to describe her as progressive meaning, I suppose, that they are impressed by her behavior in a particular crisis that your guests just so well-described, but this is a right-wing person. I think that's important to point out.

Brian Lehrer: Rob, you want to talk to Emily.

Rob Schmitz: [laughs] Sure. Yes. I think that that's an interesting perspective. I think it's interesting when we talk about right-wing and left-wing, and as Emily would totally understand from living in France, the right and left-wing in Europe is a little different from the right and left-wing in the United States, right?

Emily: A lot, yes.

[laughter]

Rob Schmitz: I think for listeners who may be unfamiliar with it--

Emily: [unintelligible 00:14:50].

Rob Schmitz: Yes. Germany's Christian Democratic Union, which is the party that Merkel is chancellor on behalf of, and its sister party, the Christian Social Union from Bavaria, is a fairly conservative block. It's a conservative party, has decades of history in Germany being that way. It is not though, I would say, probably as far right as the current state of the Republican Party in the United States. It differs on many different types of platforms because I think the Republican Party of the US, their social platform is quite different from the CDU here in Merkel's party here in Germany.

Merkel definitely was a chancellor for a right-wing German political party but I would pose that she was in that party on the more progressive or left-wing side of what is a right-wing party for especially the last six years or so. Maybe not at the beginning of her chancellor, but definitely in the last six years or so in a lot of the decisions that she's made. I want to segue a little to the candidate for the Social Democrats who just prevailed by 2% in this election, Olaf Scholz.

He's interesting in a sense, and somewhat similar to Merkel in a sense that he is on the pro-business right-wing side of what is a left-wing party here in Germany or in Germany, they would call it a center-left but I think for our listeners, it would be left of the Democratic Party if they belonged in the United States. In some ways, that's an interesting comparison because he's very similar to Merkel because he doesn't really belong in the party that he's in. I don't know if Merkel through some of the decisions and some of the policy stances that she made, sometimes you wouldn't think that she would belong in the party that she was in either.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. Emily, thank you so much. Please call us again. Let's get one more in here and it's on the election. Now that we've talked so much about Merkel's legacy, how about the election that just took place? I know you were just touching on it, Rob. Thomas in Manhattan. Let's see. Can I go to Thomas, screeners, on line seven who's a dual citizen, American and German citizen who I think wants to talk about the election results?

I'm going to give this five more seconds for that line to get cleared so I can put Thomas on the air. No. Okay. I apologize, listeners, for that little bit of confusion. Instead, one more who used to live in Germany for 10 years. Howard in Scarsdale, you're on WNYC. Hi, Howard.

Howard: Yes. I lived not far from the presidential office so I would hear from time to time in the supermarket. Hello.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. We got you.

Howard: Hello.

Brian Lehrer: We hear you.

Howard: She did her own shopping and you hardly saw any security presence. She was quite an extraordinary character. Then I moved to the East and was close to where she studied. Through American lenses, it's hard to understand how East Germans think, but you have to start with the fact that she didn't dismantle any of the social welfare state.

In fact, she augmented it and solidified it so you have cradled great security, everything is covered health-wise or even by your baby carriage if you have a baby. It's totally different than the United States. You can't even compare it. They called her Mutti, M-U-T-T-I, the average person because her eyes and ears were everywhere like an overbearing mother watching her children.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. Howard, I'm going to leave it there for time. Rob, do you agree with Howard's take that coming from East Germany and maybe liking some of what the communist mindset had instilled in her as a child, that she did not dismantle the social safety net, she built on it, even in the context of a new democratic and integrated Germany?

Rob Schmitz: I think Angela Merkel growing up in East Germany as she did understood what a lot of the challenges were for the East. Even in 2005 when she became chancellor, there were still a lot of and still are a lot of differences between West Germany and East Germany. You still sense certain differences when you travel in this country. The East is still a little less well-off. She understood those differences and she certainly made it part of her platform as chancellor to make sure that those differences were even now.

Brian Lehrer: Just real quick. I heard a passing reference on TV this morning. Tell me if I got this right. That she was so cautious, which is part of where you started in this conversation, that she was a cautious politician based on her upbringing in the East and as a scientist, that there is a word in German now for Merkel-like chronic indecision. Is that a real thing?

Rob Schmitz: [laughs] Yes, Merkeling, which is they've basically turned her name into a verb. This is I think pretty common in German. Yes, you are Merkeling if you are acting like that in that type of way, and considering everything very carefully and not making a decision until the last minute.

Brian Lehrer: Never Merkeling in his reporting even when he is reporting on Merkel. NPR's correspondent based in Berlin, Rob Schmitz. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Rob Schmitz: Thanks a lot for having me, Brian.

Copyright © 2021 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.