Angela Merkel has an awkward job – to persuade the Germans to have something new to offer in her fourth Chancellor’s term.
Can a person who has been in the same position for the past 12 years change their leadership style?
A lot of work is ahead of us,” Angela Merkel told reporters on Monday (March 12th) when she and her new coalition partner Horst Seehofer and new finance minister Olaf Scholz signed a coalition agreement with their coalition partners.
Rebuilding will be an important topic for the new government, because in the opinion of many German political experts in the German capital, the chancellor stumbles rather than smoothly slipping into a new term. The calm uneasiness that has so far made Angela so successful in the last few months disappears. CDU recorded the worst election result in their history last September. Although 33 percent was much more than any other party won, it looked like a defeat, as the CDU otherwise won over 40 percent of the votes. After that negotiations for so-called Jamaica Coalition” with Liberals (FDP) and the Greens. So, what’s new?
The ruling coalition with three partners would be the first such coalition at the federal level and looked like a fresh plan for the electorate that was saturated with the rule of the two major centrist parties over the past 12 years. In the end, however, the FDP left the negotiations and said it would enter the coalition with the CDU only if Merkel did not rule out.
Merkel addressed the reporters on Monday, pointing to the changes she has already made and the projects she plans to launch: restructuring the government by adding “homeland” departments to the Interior Ministry and setting up Digitisation, education and employment in the focus of the new German government.
She also stressed that new men will be coming to all the leading positions in the ministries, apart from her mildness and the Minister of Defense, Ursule von der Leyen. “This will change all the discussions,” she said. This government may look the same, but it is actually different, came to a conclusion from her address.
Josef Janning, a German political analyst at the European Council for Foreign Affairs, suspects that Merkel herself can do a lot to bring back voters who have lost the CDU. She has presented several new faces and she will have to do it,” she told. And she will have to let them show up in full glory and bring innovation and that is not egocentric but in a team spirit. If it could, then it will show something new happens. Merkel’s most important political issue is to prove that Europe as an idea can give new energy and strength.
Strange concessions The emphasis on reconstruction came from two unusual tasks Merkel had to face after the failure of the “Jamaican” coalition negotiations. The first – had to convince her old Social Democrats to join her in another “big” coalition, although party leader Martin Schulz this option was previously disabled. The second task was to sell an agreed coalition agreement that included several major concessions to the Social Democrats as well as its right-wing Bavarian CSU allies, which had come to general dissatisfaction within CDU party. That was a high price for her fourth term and she felt in the CDU. For example, Merkel had to set up her rivals, Jenna Spahna for the health minister, although she has different views on what the conservative CDU should actually do. Merkel is not very progressive when it comes to social issues. Despite the fact that she was dragging her party to the left, she still voted against same-sex marriages in the Bundestag last summer, and she deliberately refused to call her a feminist last April at a public hearing of the world’s most powerful women – at the Women20 conference in Berlin.
Does she change her views?
The fact that Merkel has long been in power is largely attributed to her cautious and passive ruling style – it can often be noted that she avoids great visionary speeches, instead seeking consensus by imposing her authority behind the scene.
Her management style is always compared with old men’s political styles,” said Johanna Mair, a professor of organization, strategy and leadership at Hertie School of Management. “By the logic: if we do not have leaders who are not testosterone and do not have men’s management style, then we’re done, but I’m very confident that we will evaluate its management quite differently over a few years than we do today.”
But the decline in the popularity of the CDU and the SPD suggests that peaceful centrist and compromise are no longer in the way of citizens. However, Janning does not think it will impress the chancellor. “Nothing will change Angela Merkel,” he says. “The method is fine, as long as the final result is OK, so in the eyes of most citizens of this country and beyond.” Although its passivity in coalition negotiations is criticized, “what was in the end was worth her approach to politics, which ultimately resulted in a coalition.”
For this reason, Janning does not think that Merkel will develop a more liberal attitude that is commonplace with US presidents who will win a second term. Relative success will be if it succeeds in holding the coalition together and preparing the ground for someone else from the CDU to win good results in the next federal elections,” he said.
If she can, it will be a great success.
Written by: M. Josipović
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