Let Merkel’s eclipse signal the end of the European project

So farewell then, Angela Merkel – but not until 2021. Ya think, Angela? How stable is Germany’s Heath-Robinson coalition likely to be, under the leadership of a lame-duck Chancellor who has resigned the chairmanship of her own party, set a date for her departure and announced her exit from political life? How long before somebody says, “Look here, if you’re going, go now” and tries to salvage the situation for Germany’s legacy parties by shedding the millstone that is Merkel?

In Hesse, the latest in a string of electoral disasters, Merkel’s CDU support fell by 11 points from the previous regional election, the worst result since 1966. Yet there was another political stakeholder that also suffered a serious reverse: the SPD, Merkel’s coalition partner, fell below 20 per cent. The SPD was a reluctant coalition partner, fearing enduring connection to Merkel could alienate voters.

Its worst fears have now been realized: Merkel is the kiss of death. Why should the SPD continue to commit self-harm by remaining in a government so repugnant to the electorate? If the SPD withdraws, would Berlin’s political establishment again tolerate the spectacle of Merkel scrabbling around desperately to construct a ‘Jamaican’ or other implausible coalition?

She should go now, but we in Britain should not ignore the advantage to us of this busted flush remaining in office, if not in power, surrounded by hostile conspirators, like a metaphor for the whole unstable, impotent European Union. Angela Merkel personifies everything that is wrong with the EU and her political demise is a portent of the eventual collapse of the European Project.

The myth of Merkel was a classic example of the way in which the progressive consensus and the media are routinely complicit in fabricating “great” statesmen to impress the despised public. Tony Blair, Barack Obama and all the other now discredited rois fainéants who were heralded as messiahs and who accomplished nothing but harm for the countries they misgoverned were of the same stamp as Angela Merkel.

Merkel’s father was one of the very few individuals to migrate voluntarily from West to East Germany, in 1954, which speaks volumes about the ideological climate of her home life. As a schoolgirl she was a familiar sight at the bus stop, swotting Russian grammar – the language that then was the key to power in the totalitarian Soviet satellite state of East Germany. At age 15 she won the local Russian language “Olympics”.

Merkel was an active participant in the totalitarian system, donning the uniform of the Freie Deutsche Jugend (FDJ), the Communist Party’s youth movement. At the Academy of Sciences in East Berlin she became the FDJ Secretary for Agitation and Propaganda (Agitprop), though until she was exposed in 2013 she failed to tell the full truth about it, pretending her chief responsibility had been the purchase of theatre tickets.

As late as September 1989 she insisted: “If we reform the GDR, it won’t be in terms of the Federal Republic.” Yet, 14 months later, she entered the Christian Democrat cabinet of Helmut Kohl, the patron whose political assassination she later engineered. Merkel’s notorious inscrutability is clearly a legacy of her early days of negotiating the treacherous pitfalls of the Soviet system, but that is not what makes her past important. Its importance lies in the fact that this supposed leader of Western democracy was marinated in totalitarianism and that legacy has always meant she was unsuited to democratic politics.

Like the overwhelming majority of Soviet-era apparatchiks, apart from self-serving political manoeuvres she has always been strikingly incompetent. In 2011, in a knee-jerk reaction to the Fukushima accident, she scrapped Germany’s nuclear programme overnight and substituted a mixture of Green energy sources that will cost €1 trillion by the late 2030s. A combination of Baltic wind turbines and fossil fuels has created energy instability and incoherence.

Nuclear power is an issue that deserves sober and focused debate, not abolition by decree of a tsarina (Merkel displays a portrait of Catherine the Great in her office). Ironically, it was in St Petersburg in 2013 that Merkel committed her next great error of judgement when, eager to relax, she left the G-20 summit early, leaving the United States to manoeuvre the other four European G-20 members into signing a joint declaration on a response to the use of chemical weapons in Syria, with Germany’s signature embarrassingly absent.

Her handling of the Greek financial crisis was another disaster. Her dithering allowed Finance Minister Schauble to canvass a five-year Greek exit from the euro, before Merkel’s government settled for a bailout of Greece without debt relief. This solution, described as “satisfactory” by one ECB policymaker, imposed on a country with a budget deficit at almost 9 per cent of GDP, debt above 140 per cent of GDP, unemployment at 21 per cent (48 per cent among youth), manufacturing in decline by nearly 16 per cent and 60,000 small businesses bankrupted in a period of just nine months, created a running sore.

There were many suicides in Greece and its people unapologetically likened the situation to German aggression during the War. Ultimately, though, Angela Merkel inflicted even more damage on her own people when, after winning an election on the slogan “No experiments”, she arbitrarily invited a million immigrants into Germany. When the migrant crisis began to rend the fabric of German society she equally arbitrarily ordered the other nations of Europe to accommodate them.

The resistance which that provoked reinforced the populist revolution in the Visegrad states, assured the success of Brexit in the UK referendum and now has brought a populist government to power in Italy. Merkel, the supposed “Empress” of the EU, has created havoc for Brussels and set in train the dominoes that will destroy first of all the euro, then the EU. For that we are indebted to her.

If Britain’s government and civil service were the strong players of realpolitik that they were in past centuries, the demise of Merkel would be an opportunist moment to splinter the EU and end Franco/German hegemony. Unfortunately our rulers are in the grip of Stockholm Syndrome, enslaved to the Brussels kleptocracy.

The disastrous and unchallenged supremacy of Merkel should be an object lesson to Britain. Let us hear no bogus tributes to this politician who has done nothing but harm. Let there be no expressions of concern for European “stability” and warm wishes. For it is time to face reality. They are not “partners” or even opponents: Germany and France are behaving like vicious and unforgiving enemies. They are trying to cripple our economy, unravel our Union and suppress our freedoms.

Does Emmanuel Macron have to punch Dominic Raab in the face before we acknowledge him for what he is? It is time to return to realpolitik, to the single-minded pursuit of Britain’s interests. There is no European unity; there never has been and there never will. We have allowed a sentimental delusion to subordinate our independence to charlatans like Angela Merkel. Let her political passing signal the beginning of the end of the European Project.