WITH Wagnerian grandeur Germans from time to time like to speculate about Kanzlerdämmerung, or the twilight of the chancellor—the slow but tangible decline in authority that has affected many former heads of government. Since late January, the chorus intoning the twilight of Angela Merkel, the current chancellor, has swelled. Two events recently increased the polyphony of voices.
On February 12th Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the former foreign minister and a member of the Social Democratic party (SPD), was elected to the largely ceremonial office of federal president. Backed by Mrs Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) and their SPD coalition partners, Mr Steinmeier won by a comfortable majority in a secret ballot. But there were over a hundred abstentions, presumed to have come from rebels within Mrs Merkel’s party. “A slap in the face for Merkel,” quipped an editorial in the Tageszeitung, a left-leaning newspaper. “An exercise in humility for the conservatives,” harrumphed the Tagesspiegel, a conservative one.
This followed the announcement in late January by Sigmar Gabriel, SPD party leader since 2009 and...Continue reading
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