United States of America eSeries: Missing Merkel?

Missing Merkel?

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Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good

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September 23, 2021

Missing Merkel?

"Angela Merkel's first EU summit, in December 2005, was a sign of things to come," The Economist recounts. "[UK Prime Minister] Tony Blair and [French President] Jacques Chirac were locked in combat over the seven-year budget. The chancellor, in office for three weeks, took stock of others' red lines, schooled Mr Blair and Mr Chirac in the finer details and, after negotiating for hours (and oiling the wheels with German money), brokered a compromise. If the rest of Europe is nervous over Mrs Merkel's departure, it is because she has made herself the indispensable European: brilliantly briefed, invested in personal relationships, and possessing almost superhuman negotiating stamina."

Germans will vote Sunday, and once a new government is formed, Merkel will depart after 16 years in power. But if the EU will miss Merkel for having "held Europe together when it counts," The Economist writes that her legacy is clouded by missed opportunities and a lack of grander designs.

For all her technocratic talent, Merkel is leaving behind a "mess," the magazine writes—having failed to invest more public money or to play a more aggressive role on the international stage. Parts of Germany face declines in working-age populations; its celebrated auto industry is vulnerable.

Merkel's once-dominant Christian Democratic Union has suffered a "slow-motion collapse," declares a Der Spiegel essay by Lukas Eberle, Christoph Hickmann, and Veit Medick: Its candidate for Chancellor, Armin Laschet, has run an uninspired campaign, they write, and the left-leaning Social Democrats are now favored to take the helm.

Back to the Table?

At Foreign Affairs, Ali Vaez and Vali Nasr write that to salvage the 2015 nuclear deal, the US and Iran must each change its approach and reconsider red lines—including, for the US, rolling back certain sanctions not explicitly tied to nuclear issues and, for Iran, limiting enrichment. "None of the concessions required to get the negotiations out of the doldrums will be easy," Vaez and Nasr write, but saving the deal "is far preferable and less costly than the alternatives.

The Real American Ruling Class?

The super-rich do exist, Patrick Wyman writes for The Atlantic, but in the US at least, the more important political overclass is a different "American gentry"—those who own agricultural or manufacturing interests and reside in multi-million-dollar golf-course homes, not stylized villas or lavish penthouses. They're dotted across the country in small cities and towns, and their investment in social and economic institutions gives them power.

Looking at his hometown of Yakima, Washington, Wyman writes that "[c]ommercial agriculture," which dominates the economy, "is a lucrative industry, at least for those who own the orchards, the cold-storage units, the processing facilities, and the large businesses that cater to them. … Ownership of the real, core assets is where the region's wealth comes from, and it doesn't extend down the social hierarchy. Yet this bounty is enough to produce hilltop mansions, a few high-end restaurants, and a staggering array of expensive vacation homes in Hawaii, Palm Springs, and the San Juan Islands." Small-time magnates and local "grandees" with inherited wealth aren't the same as global plutocrats, finance executives, or lawyers, but their economic power is important to the country and its politics, in Wyman's view.

"The yeoman developer of luxury condominiums, the single-digit-millionaire meatpacking-plant owner, the property-management entrepreneur," Wyman writes: "These were the people who, remembering or inventing their tradition of dominance over their towns and cities, flocked to Make America Great Again."

Forget Offsets: Decarbonizing Is Hard

With the approach of COP26—this year's UN climate conference, set to begin Oct. 31—Brooke Masters writes for the Financial Times that while some companies boast of going green, we need to look past the "smoke and mirrors" of tree-planting "offsets," for instance, and acknowledge that decarbonization is more complicated.

It requires recycling more material in the supply chain, cutting out plastics, and revamping manufacturing processes and product designs, Masters writes. Some companies are doing it, but "the few that are trying to do the right thing are openly gambling that governments will make it worth their while."