When Condoleezza Rice left the Middle East recently after sizing up the chances of relaunching an Israeli-Palestinian peace process, her first port of call was not Downing Street. And it certainly was not Paris. Rather, the United States secretary of state headed for the gleaming palace of steel, glass and concrete that is the German chancellery at the heart of the new Berlin to swap notes with Angela Merkel.
It’s a measure of the German chancellor’s sudden emergence as the pivotal politician in Europe and the West that Rice should take her Middle East ideas to Berlin. But it’s small wonder. In London, the Blair decade has entered its final months. In Paris, the Chirac era is fading and no one knows who will be running France in a few months’ time.
In Berlin, by contrast, 2007 is the year of the pastor’s daughter and physicist from eastern Germany.
Hers is a remarkable and improbable career trajectory. Less than 20 years ago, Merkel was a stranger to politics, an apparently conventional academic in communist eastern Germany. By late 2005, having traded in the gauche pudding-bowl hairstyle and dowdy clothing for smart dark trouser suits and turquoise jewellery, she became the eighth chancellor of modern Germany, breaking every rule in the German political book: the first woman, the first easterner, a Protestant in a Christian democratic party traditionally run by Rhineland Catholics.
Fourteen months into her rule, Merkel could be forgiven if her characteristic enigmatic smile widened to a broad grin. A robust German economic recovery is in full swing after years of stagnation, persistently high unemployment is tumbling, German exports are putting in their best performance since 2000. And the year begins with Merkel chairing the G8 and occupying the presidency of the European Union.
Are the burdens of power and responsibility causing her sleepless nights? “Not because of that,” she says. “Fear is not a good political adviser.”
Merkel and Rice were likely, at Merkel’s prodding, to outline a plan to revive what is known as the quartet, bringing together the Americans, the Russians, the United Nations and the EU on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“We want to take on responsibility in the Middle East process even if we’re aware that it is an extremely difficult political area,” the chancellor told The Guardian in an interview at the chancellery in Berlin. “We know that the issue of the two-states solution is of the greatest importance for many other conflicts in the region.
“Condoleezza Rice’s report will be a basis for seeing how the quartet can play a sensible and important role.”
Merkel pushed the quartet revival with George W Bush in the White House last week. Next week she is in the Kremlin with Vladimir Putin where she is likely to have a few choice words to say about Russia’s latest shenanigans with its oil and gas supplies to Europe, not least as Germany is Russia’s most important energy customer.
Her predecessor, Gerhard Schröder, in his recent memoirs, described the Russian leader as “an impeccable democrat”. Merkel grew up under Soviet communism and has a more detailed and nuanced understanding of where the ex-KGB Russian leader is coming from. Does she share Schröder’s view? “I have not said that yet and I am not going to say it now,” she states pointedly. “With Russia, I use the words strategic partnership.” Merkel has a disarming knack of being very firm while not sounding at all stern. Diffident, modest, seemingly shy and displaying a formidable grasp of detail, she also possesses a ruthless streak.
Her early political career in post-reunification Germany in the 1990s she owed to Helmut Köhl, who brought her into his Cabinet in junior positions after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He also patronised her, calling her his mädchen (girl). She was loyal. But when Köhl was disgraced in a party funding scandal after he left office in 1998, Merkel turned on him mercilessly.
The 52-year-old has shown similar stamina in getting to the top of her Christian Democratic Union party despite the condescension and frequent hostility from the middle-aged, west German male party barons who traditionally control the CDU.
It has been an uphill struggle. Now at the peak of her powers, the agenda she has set herself also looks like a tall order. Energy security, the Middle East, a looming crisis in Kosovo, which is expected to have its independence from Serbia imposed within months, better transatlantic relations, and a new relationship between Russia and Europe are all crowding her in-tray. If there is a risk in all this preoccupation with international affairs, of neglecting pressing business at home, then it is a risk that, for the moment, Merkel is prepared to take.
Then there is Europe. It is the EU and her determination to salvage a European constitution that many have written off as dead that is one of the central aims for her chancellorship. Poignantly, she ascribes her fascination with and commitment to Europe to her sheltered and deprived upbringing on the other side of the Iron Curtain. “For me, this [Europe] issue has a different perspective because until I was 35 years old, I only knew the countries of eastern and central Europe … I never knew Great Britain or France … Because of that, of course, I developed a great curiosity at an age when others had known all this for a long time. But a passion for Europe is so much in the German interest that any chancellor should have it.”
Passion apart, there is also the politics. Merkel has just launched an ambitious, if discreet, campaign to rescue the constitution. She is already highly rated as a good listener and a skilful fixer. On the constitution, though, she wants to get her way and intends to bang heads for the next six months of her EU presidency to that end.
Her team has drafted a detailed timetable for what looks like a make-or-break attempt to reshape the way Europe is run. In an unusual move, she has asked all EU leaders to appoint a senior figure to resume negotiations on the constitution behind closed doors over the next few months. There is to be minimal public disclosure. She hopes to avoid any further popular votes or referendums on the constitution.
In June Merkel will table an EU “roadmap”, outlining how to enact the constitution within two years. The aim is to have the deal in the bag before the next European parliament elections in 2009.
The French and Dutch dealt grievous blows to the constitution when they rejected it in 2005. But Merkel defends the charter and suggests there could be no further enlargement of the 27-strong EU unless agreement was reached on a treaty reshaping how the EU works. “I haven’t said anything publicly about the consultation process and I am not going to start by stating German conditions,” she says. “It is clear something has to happen because it is precisely those countries which are sometimes critical about the EU constitution that want the EU to be enlarged … We need a new treaty urgently to make enlargement possible again.”
As to whether that means a monumental trade-off, she will not say. She is a key opponent, for example, of Turkey joining the EU. Britain, not keen on the constitution, is keen on Turkey.
Could Merkel get her constitution if she yielded on Turkey? The German argument is that, without the new rulebook, the EU of 27 will condemn itself to being a bickering assembly mired in irrelevance. The constitution would resolve that by giving the EU a president, a foreign minister and recasting the way decisions are taken.
Dear to the German project, though rarely stated, is the fact that, under a new system of double majority voting, the charter would for the first time in the history of the EU grant Germany its due as the biggest EU member, giving it proportionately more clout, and making it the most powerful member.
When the French and the Dutch said no, the EU was thrust into a time of gloom officially dubbed a “period of reflection”. That melancholy period is over, Merkel argues. Of the EU 27, 18 have ratified the constitution, she says.
And she won’t settle for a “constitutionÂ-lite”, a watered down version of the original that Nicolas Sarkozy is suggesting. “We’re defending this constitutional treaty although we take note that others have rejected it,” she says. “We have to search for compromises but we will not take a minimalist approach … We can’t restart the discussion from scratch.
“To all those who are always afraid of too much Europe, we have to tell them that on many points it is the rights of the member states that are strengthened. But we need to have more order on the question of where Europe is not allowed to interfere and where it can act.”
If she succeeds in her European project, Merkel will be hailed at home as a great German chancellor. With a modesty that may be tactical, she is also eager to lower expectations. Success, she says, would mean that “everybody is happy. But we’ll never manage that. We’ll try to make sure that nobody is unhappy.” — Â