Wunder Woman

Meeting Obama next week in Washington, German Chancellor Angela Merkel is on a furious quest to save Europe.

Guillaume Horcajuelo / EPA-Corbis

German Chancellor Angela Merkel arrives at the NATO Summit in Portugal on November 20, 2010.

The arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn had gone down 48 hours earlier, and Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, was still absorbing the news. Settling into a chair in a vast conference room in the glass-and-steel Chancellery in Berlin, Merkel grimaced and shook her head when asked about her reaction to the International Monetary Fund chief’s plummet from grace. She had been scheduled to meet Strauss-Kahn to discuss the worsening euro crisis, but the meeting had been scrapped after he was charged with sexual assault. “I will say that the presumption of innocent until proven guilty applies to everybody,” the careful Merkel said, shifting in her chair. “I will wait and see how the legal process proceeds.”

It was early afternoon in Berlin, and Merkel was taking time out of her rigidly programmed schedule to meet with an American reporter—a rare concession for a politician who almost never talks to the foreign press. And Merkel exerted as much control as she could over the process.

Wearing a prim beige jacket and black pants, Merkel kept her answers concise, in German, and with her press attaché firmly at her side as a timekeeper. But her unyielding demeanor—and insistence on speaking her native tongue—was broken when I paused to admire the view from the window. The Germans, after unification, built a dazzling, celebratory cityscape along the former East-West fault line. Switching to English, Merkel, who grew up in the Communist East, admitted she still found it surprising to be going to work each day “on this side”—in the former West Berlin—“and not on the other side.”

More surprising, perhaps, is the fact that in her nearly six years as chancellor, Merkel, now 56, has established herself as Europe’s strongest and most durable leader. She has, in turbulent times, guided her Christian Democratic Union to healthy wins in two elections. Forbes magazine has repeatedly named her “the world’s most powerful woman.” And though her standing at home has slipped this year, among the current crop of European leaders, who almost comically embody national stereotypes—who, after all, is more Italian than Silvio Berlusconi, more French than Nicolas Sarkozy, more British than David Cameron, and, indeed, more German than Merkel?—she still seems the most assured in her office.

“Angela is the very opposite of the flashy glad-hander as a politician,” says former British prime minister Tony Blair. “She is one of the easiest politicians to underestimate, and it’s one of the stupidest things any politician can do.”

She has steered Germany through the worst global financial meltdown since the Great Depression, keeping budgets down and confidence high. Last year, Germany enjoyed a growth rate of 3.6 percent—the highest in Western Europe—and the economy is on track to remain strong this year. In the euro crisis, Merkel has been a strong voice for fiscal discipline while diligently (if sometimes reluctantly) cobbling together rescue plans for Europe’s profligate nations—Greece, Ireland, and Portugal, who have chafed loudly at German demands. (A Greek newspaper wrote that Germany was turning debtor countries into “colonies of the Fourth Reich” and Europe into a “financial Dachau.”) But beyond such hissy fits, there’s little the poorer EU nations can do. Without Berlin, the euro would be kaput. Germany is Europe’s only truly global economy—the world’s second-largest exporter after China and the fourth-largest economy after the U.S., China, and Japan.

“Her constant fear, her constant desire, will be to make sure that any help that’s given to Greece is given on a basis that cures the problem rather than merely postpones it,” says Blair. “Her concern—naturally—is to make sure that any help that is given is help that she can justify to her own people. It really is as simple as that.”

In what is still a men’s club of world leaders, she holds her own. During a February phone call, she rebuked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for his refusal to extend a settlement freeze. When he castigated her for an anti-settlement U.N. vote, she barked back: “How dare you?” according to the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz. When I pressed her on the conversation, she told me that she never talked about her private phone conversations, but then added: “I believe that finding a two-state solution is now more urgent that ever … and a suspension of settlement-building would be a justifiable step to make progress. As a friend of the Jewish state, I’m profoundly convinced that a negotiated solution is in the best interests of Israel.”

For all her apparent grandeur, close friends describe her as uneitel—a term connoting modesty. She still vacations in the same cottage in the former East Germany that she owned before the fall of the Wall, and her husband, Joachim Sauer, a fellow scientist, commutes regularly from their unpretentious apartment in central Berlin to the institute of chemistry at Humboldt University.

Merkel is efficient, in part because she has kept her independence and her private life to herself, says James Wolfensohn, the former World Bank president. “She’s not someone running around the world in tiaras and things, trying to gain recognition because of her presidency,” says Wolfensohn, who admires her toughness. “I don’t know how you run Germany without being very strong—I don’t think it’s for weaklings.”

On the world stage, she has been a vocal supporter of human rights, repeatedly pointing to her own remarkable journey from Lutheran priest’s daughter in the Communist East to leader of a united Germany. “Above all, it influenced me in terms of recognizing that freedom is not a given,” she says. “That led me to becoming, and I believe I still am, a fervent advocate of freedom, and also of freedom of opinion.”

Merkel will meet with President Obama in D.C. next week to discuss the economy, the ongoing wars, and transatlantic relations. Afterward she will dine at the White House, where the president will present her with the Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor. Ironically, her award comes at a time of growing tensions in the German-American alliance. In contrast to the back-slapping (and shoulder-massaging) she shared with George W. Bush, Merkel regards Obama warily, though they share the same cerebral style.

The relationship between the two got off to a bad start in July 2008, when Merkel criticized the prospect of Obama using Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate as a backdrop for a campaign rally. A year later, Obama, now president, declined an invitation to attend the 20th-anniversary celebration of the fall of the Wall, prompting one American wag to write that Obama had replaced John F. Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” with the more prosaic “Ich bin beschäftigt” (“I’m busy”). Obama still hasn’t taken time to visit Berlin, feeding the perception in the Merkel camp that he doesn’t view Europe as a priority.

 Written by : http://www.newsweek.com/2011/05/28/angela-merkel-germany-s-wonder-wom.html