When Angela Merkel scraped into power last year, few people predicted that she would still be riding so high this summer. The woman whom two thirds of voters before the election in September didn't trust to run the country has become Germany's most popular leader in decades.
How come? First, she is clever enough to realise that Germans needed a break from politics, or at least from the politics pursued by her predecessor Gerhard Schröder. She has presented herself as everything he was not. While he made loud noises about the need for radical economic reforms (by German standards) and sacrifices by ordinary people, she has coined the soothing catchphrase that policy changes should only occur in digestible "small steps."
Second, her style is everything but Schröderesque. This is not too difficult, as Merkel is not by nature a table-thumping macho politician, but she has still made Germans realise what a relief it is to have someone at the helm who is hard-working, sensible and discreet.
And as with Merkel, also with her "grand coalition" government. Despite the doomsday scenarios after the election about political paralysis and a radicalisation of fringe parties, her alliance of Christian and Social Democrats can be awarded a reasonable report card. There are regular spats, but cabinet ministers have acknowledged the need to get on with their traditional enemies, at least for two or three years, to bolster their re-election chances for 2009.
It has helped that the opposition has become weak, not radical. The new Left party of ex-Social Democrat (SPD) rebel Oskar Lafontaine is being overwhelmed by internal battles between Trotskyists and realists, while the Greens have become a pale shadow now that Joschka Fischer has stepped aside. The liberal Free Democrats are moaning about tax increases, and about a government that is "too comfortable with itself," but don't seem to realise that political comfort food is exactly what Germans want.
The honeymoon cannot go on forever, and Merkel is already losing some of her shine. Yet it is the SPD that has the biggest headaches. The party's underlying problems—an out-of-date programme and a third fewer members than in 1990 (down to 580,000 members today)—have been compounded by a careless loss of its top leadership over the last seven months.
First former party chairman Franz Müntefering resigned in November after a supposedly cunning power play in the party's executive committee went badly wrong. Müntefering himself had taken over from Schröder only 18 months earlier; after him came Matthias Platzeck, a prominent east German whose election was seen as opening a new, modernising era for the party. Sadly, a nervous breakdown led to his resignation in April.
The new leader is Kurt Beck, state premier of Rhineland Palatinate. While a competent provincial leader with an earthy style, he is no political visionary. His election at a special congress in May means the party has a chance of stemming the downward trend in its opinion poll ratings—but not much hope in the near term of working out what sort of social democracy Germany needs in the 21st century.
But the Stasi never tortured anyone
While the SPD sorts itself out, Merkel will have East Germany on her mind, and not only because George W Bush is dropping in to her Baltic coast constituency on 14th July on his way to the G8 summit in St Petersburg.
The east is back in the news in Germany. Sixty years after the war and a decade and a half since reunification, Germany's reputation as a role model for others in coming to terms with grim history could be fraying.
The reason is the emergence of a hard core of former top officers of the Stasi, the former secret police, who are trying to plant seeds of doubt about the official version of East German history, which portrays the Stasi as the baddest of the GDR's bad guys. The officers, elderly men who disrupt public meetings, write to newspapers and act as troublemakers on guided tours of former GDR institutions, argue that the Stasi was a legitimate agency that never tortured or persecuted anyone.
Prosecutors have faced big legal problems in pursuing crimes committed in the former GDR. Yet in the Stasi officers' revisionist thinking, the fact that they have faced only a handful of court cases shows that the mammoth spy agency was not as awful as victims' groups make out. The outbursts have struck a very raw nerve among easterners, as they threaten to break a taboo by questioning the post-reunification political settlement in the east.
They also show that the cliché about east and west Germans still being divided by "a wall in their heads" remains a fair approximation of reality. While many easterners have been shocked and disturbed by the developments, most westerners appear uninterested.
This provoked Marianne Birthler, the government commissioner for the Stasi archives in Berlin, to criticise leading politicians of all parties for being unwilling to take on the Stasi officers.
Merkel, Germany's most powerful easterner, has not taken a clear stance on the controversy. Many of her fellow ex-GDR citizens question how eastern she really feels, since she worked so hard after 1990 to assimilate herself into western German politics. Maybe now she can show her true colours.
