Chancellor Angela Merkel, who was sworn in Tuesday, is Germany's first woman chancellor, but it may be more significant that she is the first head of government from the former communist German state.
Although she has been in the west since the re-unification of her country in 1990, some Berlin sources said her personal style still reflects the behavioral patterns of living under a tightly controlled regime -- caution, secretive decision making, and reliance on a few close confidantes.
Her past is also likely to color the main lines of her foreign policy, the sources told United Press International. Like other politicians from ex-Soviet countries in Eastern Europe and the Baltic, she is a convinced Atlanticist and pro-American. At the same time, having grown up under Soviet control, she is less inclined to warm up to Moscow than did her socialist predecessor, Gerhard Schroeder. But also unlike her predecessor, she can address President George Bush in English, which she speaks well, and Putin in Russian, which she handles even better.
She is expected to make the United States one of her first foreign trips to demonstrate the importance that her government attaches to the Berlin-Washington relationship, and to repair what she perceives to be the strain caused by Schroeder's blunt opposition to the Iraq war.
Although the Bush administration is pleased with a conservative victory in Germany, the White House is somewhat skeptical of her leadership potential. To Washington, Merkel is largely "an unknown quantity," a senior administration official commented the other day. Even though she was minister of the environment in Helmut Kohl's last government almost a decade ago, she will need to demonstrate that she has a firm grip on Germany's grand coalition of her own Christian Democrat (CDU) party and the outgoing Social Democrats, the SPD. And there is also the matter of her longevity in the straitjacket of an administration that binds together two different ideologies.
Last week some European financial analysts were giving it six months before the incompatibility makes the partnership untenable. But most analysts are predicting at least a two-year life span for the coalition. They argue that two months of thorough bi-lateral negotiations have ironed out many of the possible problems in advance.
"With solid majorities in both houses of parliament, the new government should be able to push through the major reforms many agree must be passed to put Germany back on track," comments Viola Herms Drath, long-time Washington-based leading German journalist and member of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy. "The grand coalition is in Germany's best national interests."
Merkel is known to be unpopular with the national leadership of her own party, and to rely on the regional structure for her real power base. Many conservatives resent the fact that the SPD ended up with more cabinet ministers than her own supposedly victorious conservatives, suggesting that she has had to give away the store in order to stay in office.
A German insider says Merkel's past provides plenty of clues of her intelligence, political shrewdness -- and survival skills. To become a successful analytical scientist under communism could not have been easy for the daughter of a Lutheran pastor. Overall, Christian churches were tolerated in East Germany, but the Lutherans were suspect because some pastors were openly critical of the regime. This, incidentally, was in part a reaction to post-war criticism leveled against German churches that they put up little resistance to the Nazi regime, and the clergy was determined that the charge would not be repeated under the communists.
Angela joined the Pioneers -- the official communist children's organization -- at the age of seven, as did most children in East Germany, and as a teenager moved on to become an active member of the FDJ, the League of Young Communists, where she was in charge of cultural activities for teenagers in her neighborhood. She studied Marxism-Leninism in her engineering courses. She was never a member of the East German Communist party, but neither was she ever "a protester" (as she says) against the repressive, secret police ridden government in East Berlin. To ease her conscience -- as she has put it -- she committed small acts of rebellion, such as wearing jeans when she wasn't supposed to, occasionally skipping Marxism classes, and going to church. It was only after the Berlin wall was dismantled and the East German regime was in its death throes that she became a political activist.
The U.S. embassy in Berlin has apparently advised Washington not to expect great changes in policy substance from the new German coalition, and a few new areas of difference. Merkel will not reverse her predecessor's refusal to deploy troops in Iraq: public opposition to any direct involvement in what Schroeder once described as an American "adventure" is too strong and cuts across party lines. She will, however, maintain the strong commitment to playing a leading role through NATO in Afghanistan. She has also expressed little interest in continuing Schroeder's campaign to acquire for Germany a permanent seat in the U.N. Security Council, for which the Bush administration has shown very little enthusiasm. The new difference is her opposition to Turkey's admission to the European Union. Washington's strongly supports Turkey's admission.
A German source in Washington said the appointment of what to many is a near unknown as foreign minister, the SPD official Frank-Walter Steinmeier who was Schroeder's chief-of-staff, and a former coordinator of the German intelligence service, and a Christian Democrat junior politician, Franz Josef Jung, as defense minister, suggests that Merkel intends to take a major role in foreign policy. The neophyte chancellor may find this a lot to handle. Even so, Herms Drath points out, "The successful conclusion of the coalition talks and the promise of a stable government was Merkel's first leadership test, and provides an indication of her leadership."
