When I first encountered Angela Merkel, at a rally in Stuttgart in 2005, she was unapologetically championing Margaret Thatcher as her inspiration. Well, a little bit apologetically – she also named Hillary Clinton. But she sounded very Thatcherite as she lectured the crowd on Germany's decline into lassitude and joblessness, which, she said, had been the product of their overgenerous state. She was going to be, if not an Iron Lady, then the lady to give Germany a high-starch ironing.
Or so it seemed. After a dozen years in office, Ms. Merkel has proved vastly more politically successful and internationally influential than Ms. Thatcher ever could have been. But she has done so by turning in the opposite direction: Not for her the high-proof ideology and short sharp shocks of her British predecessor.
If Thatcherism represented sudden and painful change at any expense, Merkelism means stability at any cost: an all-encompassing bid for stability in economic, diplomatic and political life, often at the expense of badly needed political diversity and economic reform.
This week, the cost of that decade-long sprint for stability became too apparent. Ms. Merkel's failure to form a government after endless negotiations, nine weeks after her party won the largest number of seats in her fourth national election victory, showed just how frayed and fractious she has made Germany's traditionally ultraco-operative political system.
This has been a decade of painful compromises and deals made to keep things steady but boring. In order to win voters away from the Green Party, she adopted their opposition to nuclear power – and promptly one-upped them by banning all nuclear generation in Germany. The ecological consequences were terrible – Germany is now heavily dependent on ultrapolluting brown coal, long after it should have phased it out to meet important climate commitments.
In order to maintain domestic political peace in Germany, she forced the euro crisis, which was devastating to Greece, Italy and Spain, to continue for years longer than necessary by insisting on tight-money policies as the rest of the world was going the other way.
And as Europe badly needed Germany to boost domestic demand so it would stop exporting debt to its southern neighbours, she insisted on maintaining the austere wage and benefit policies her predecessor Gerhard Schroeder had introduced – the starched-shirt policies that have kept Germans poorer and more indebted than they need to be, driving some of them to the fringes.
True, her Christian Democratic Union holds about as many seats as it did after the 2009 election, and German voters tell pollsters they consider her the only viable candidate for Chancellor, but today, no mainstream party is eager to form a coalition with her. The conventional social-democratic, green and liberal opposition parties have all eroded perilously by having done so over the past 12 years. Here in Bavaria, the right-wing branch of her party complains loudly that she's been too conciliatory. Her heavy-handed stability has left chaos in political circles.
That the centre-left Social Democratic Party now appears likely to end this impasse by breaking its promise not to join Ms. Merkel in her third "grand coalition" (imagine a Conservative-Liberal power-sharing government) is hardly a good sign. As the Social Democrats' Leader Martin Schulz has learned the hard way, being in a coalition with Ms. Merkel will destroy your party's future electability.
Far worse, it will send even more voters fleeing to the extreme fringes. In September, Germans voted in record numbers for the Left Party, the successor to the old East German Communist Party, and for the first time for the Alternative for Germany (AfD), an extreme-right party of racial intolerance; together, these politically untouchable parties won more than a fifth of the 709 parliamentary seats (most of them from voters in the economically depressed states of the formerly communist east).
Those votes, surveys show, were a rejection of discredited mainstream politics far more than a response to any specific policy or event (contrary to what many North Americans seem to think, the cross-border migration flood of 2015, while difficult for Ms. Merkel's party and expensive for governments, seems not to have been an issue for 2017 voters: The AfD voters were overwhelmingly people untouched by immigration, part of a far-right trend that rose simultaneously across the formerly communist world).
Remember Ms. Thatcher's glib pledge, three years before being unceremoniously booted out of office, that she would "go on and on?" Ms. Merkel has now fulfilled it: She will likely stay in power through 2021. The problem, though, is that her citizens will just keep going on and on, not by choice but out of lack of choice, without any of the change they've so often been denied at the ballot box and in their daily lives.
Slow and steady may have won the race, but only by tearing up the track.
Doug Saunders