Germany Grapples With Merkel’s LegacyAngela Merkel was lionized by liberals, but her supposedly prudential policies have fallen to pieces since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
PHILIP PLICKERT
APRIL 25, 2022
Upon Angela Merkel’s departure from the Kanzleramt in Berlin in late 2021, liberals everywhere loaded her with praise. She was lauded as a European and world leader, a skillful crisis manager, a guarantor of stability against dangerous populists.
Shortly after Donald Trump’s election, the New York Times had proclaimed her “the liberal West’s last defender.” During the migrant crisis of 2015, when Merkel opened the doors to more than one million asylum seekers from the Middle East and elsewhere, some likened her to Mother Teresa. She was also applauded for her green-energy and climate policies. “Mutti” (benign mother) Merkel was almost a secular saint. Less than five months since she left, all this hyperbole looks absurd.
It has become terribly clear that, far from leaving Germany in good shape, her policies have left it divided, burdened, and appallingly vulnerable to external pressures. One prominent German pundit, Jan Fleischhauer of Focus magazine, has described Merkel’s legacy as “toxic.” Merkel’s supposed strategic thinking—allegedly always considering the final outcomes—has been revealed to be a myth.
The most obvious example is her energy policy, which has left Germany dangerously dependent on Russian sources of energy. This is a side effect of the Energiewende (the green “energy transition”) she championed for over a decade, during which time she hastily abandoned nuclear power in the wake of the Fukushima accident. Germany has since shut down almost all of its nuclear plants, and is now phasing out coal power.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/germany-struggles-with-merkels-legacy/
