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slug: angela-merkel name: Angela Merkel role: Chancellor of Germany (2005–2021) type: person

Angela Merkel

Biography

Angela Dorothea Merkel (born 1954) was Chancellor of Germany for sixteen years, from 2005 to 2021 — the first woman to hold the office, the first chancellor raised in East Germany, and, for most of the euro crisis years, the single most powerful decision-maker in Europe. Born in Hamburg, she grew up in the Brandenburg town of Templin, in the communist German Democratic Republic, where her father served as a Lutheran pastor. She trained as a physicist, earned a doctorate in quantum chemistry in Leipzig, and worked at the East Berlin Academy of Sciences until the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.

She entered politics in the peaceful revolution of that year, joined the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in 1990, and rose with startling speed: minister for women and youth, then environment minister under Helmut Kohl, CDU secretary-general in 1998, and party leader in 2000 after publicly breaking with Kohl over his donations scandal. In November 2005 she became chancellor at the head of a grand coalition, and she won four consecutive elections, governing until December 2021.

For Soros, Merkel is not a biographical subject but the central counterparty of his public life in the 2010s. Three episodes define her place in the corpus. First, the euro crisis of 2009–2015, in which her incremental, austerity-first management made her, in Soros's judgment, the leader who preserved the euro while entrenching the division of the eurozone into creditor and debtor countries — the dynamic he analyzes under European disintegration. Second, her transformation in 2014–2015: standing up to Putin over Ukraine, keeping Greece in the euro at real political cost, and opening Germany's doors to refugees — the moment Soros began calling her the leader of the free world. Third, her final full year in office, when the December 2020 compromise with Hungary and Poland over rule-of-law conditionality drew his angriest Merkel essay of all.

Soros never treats her as a villain. He repeatedly records his admiration — for her leadership qualities, her political skill, and her personal history under communism, which he believes made her a genuine adherent of the open society. His critique is structural: a gifted politician who read German public opinion too well, and led it too little.

Key Stories

The 2008 declaration. In Soros's reconstruction of the euro crisis — delivered at Frankfurt's Center for Financial Studies and expanded for The New York Review of Books in 2012 — the disintegration of Europe began with a single Merkel decision. In the week after Lehman Brothers failed, she declared that the guarantee against further bank failures would be given by each country acting separately, not by the European Union acting jointly. Soros's verdict: that was "the first step in a process of disintegration that is now threatening to destroy the European Union." He is careful to add that she read German public opinion correctly; the failure he diagnoses is one of leadership, not of political instinct.

"Do the minimum to preserve the euro." This is Soros's canonical formula for Merkel's crisis management. Germany, he argued, having the most to lose from a breakup, would always do the minimum necessary to prevent one — but nothing more. The result: a crisis indefinitely extended, debtor countries paying punitive risk premiums to refinance their debt, and a Europe in which Germany would be seen as an imperial power, hated and resisted rather than loved and admired. Eurobonds, he noted bitterly in Frankfurt, would cost Germany far less than the minimum course she preferred — "Since Chancellor Merkel vetoed Eurobonds, the arguments I have put forward here have not even been considered."

The Draghi turn, summer 2012. When markets pushed Spanish and Italian yields to breaking point, Merkel backed ECB president Mario Draghi against her own Bundesbank nominee Jens Weidmann — the game-changing event that committed Germany to the euro's preservation and made "whatever it takes" possible. Soros credits the move while marking its limit: intervention narrowed risk premiums but could not undo the creditor–debtor divide, and once market pressure abated, "Germany started to whittle down the promises it had made at the height of the crisis." The Cyprus bailout of 2013, with its bail-in of depositors, proved to him that the pattern held.

The Pyrrhic victory, 2013. After her resounding re-election, Soros published Angela Merkel's Pyrrhic Victory: she had ensured the euro's survival at the least possible cost to Germany, and the result was an intolerable, unstable inferior equilibrium in which "the debtor countries feel all the pain, while the creditors impose the misconceptions and taboos." He urged her incoming coalition to appoint an independent expert commission to evaluate the alternatives "without regard to the prevailing taboos," and urged Germany to learn to act as a "benign hegemon" — or, failing that, to consider leaving the euro and letting the debtor countries introduce eurobonds themselves (Why Germany Should Lead or Leave).

From critic to supporter, 2014–2015. Putin's attack on Ukraine changed the ledger. Merkel forged European unanimity on sanctions — moving, Soros wrote, "far ahead of the German public and business community." In 2015 she spent real political capital keeping Greece in the euro, against her finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble and much of her own party; then, abandoning her characteristic caution, she announced that Germany would process hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers. Asked by WirtschaftsWoche whether Time magazine was right to name her "Chancellor of the Free World," Soros answered yes: in resisting Russian aggression "she became a leader who stuck her neck out in opposition to prevailing opinion." He supported her "not only with words but also with deeds," through foundations working on the ground in Greece.

The surrender, December 2020. The arc ends bitterly. Facing the Hungarian and Polish veto of the EU budget over rule-of-law conditionality, Merkel brokered a compromise that Soros called the worst of all possible worlds (The Costs of Merkel's Surrender to Hungarian and Polish Extortion). He acknowledged the pressure she was under — fifteen years in office, approaching retirement, Macron distracted by crises at home — and still judged that Orbán's bluff should have been called. The primary victims of the deal, he wrote, would be the people of Hungary.

Impact on Soros's Work

Merkel's role in Soros's corpus is unique: she is the one sitting head of government toward whom an entire decade-long body of advocacy was aimed. "That is why I am trying to change her mind," he told Der Spiegel in the 2012 interview — "I still believe Germans are open to arguments." Nearly every euro-crisis text of 2011–2013 — How Europe Can Rescue Europe, My Seven Point Plan to Save the Eurozone, Germany's Choice, the Frankfurt remarks — is addressed, in effect, to her office: she alone could authorize eurobonds, a European Fiscal Authority, or the stimulus phase of his two-phase policy of austerity plus growth.

Analytically, Merkel's Germany is the case study that powers Soros's account of European disintegration: the reflexive sequence by which her 2008 declaration created the debtor–creditor divide, and the divide then made reversal politically impossible. The framing turns on reflexivity and far-from-equilibrium dynamics — financial markets, operating with far-from-perfect knowledge, took more than a year to price in what her declaration meant — and on fallibility: "Neither the authorities nor the markets recognized this prior to the crisis, attesting to the fallibility of both."

The relationship also shaped his practice of political philanthropy. Because Merkel shared, in his reading, the values of the open society — formed by her East German childhood as a pastor's daughter as his were formed by surviving the Holocaust in occupied Hungary — disagreement never became enmity. He fought her austerity policy in print for years and then supported her refugee policy with money and organization; he criticized her leadership in the euro crisis and defended her when Orbán challenged her for the leadership of Europe. Few figures in the corpus embody so completely his rule that one can be her supporter while disagreeing on a number of important issues.

Key Passages