A power vacuum made things even worse

Published in

zakrzewskidorothy

6 min readApr 24, 2021

In Germany, the current political era is sometimes referred to as “Merkeldammerung” — the twilight of Merkel. After more than a decade and a half as chancellor, and nearly two decades as leader of the center-right Christian Democratic Union of Germany, she said in her retirement announcement that it was time for the country and her party “to start a new chapter.” Elections in September 2021 will decide the country’s new leader.

Merkel’s long grip on power had made her a defining force in German politics. But all of a sudden, the country found itself on the brink of a power vacuum. Politicians both in and out of Merkel’s party had a chance to vie for the country’s top political position. And many criticized her policies, in part to contrast themselves and bolster their own political fortunes.

All of that became apparent during the week of Ash Wednesday in February, which is traditionally used by German politicians to preview their electoral messaging for the year ahead and criticize their opponents. This year, the hot topic was the country’s continuing months-long lockdown.

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Armin Laschet, who had been recently elected to head Merkel’s Christian Democrat party, criticized the lockdown — describing Merkel’s push for communal restrictions as the government treating voters like “underaged children.”

Armin Laschet, head of Merkel’s party, the Christian Democrats, criticized the government’s lockdown efforts to contain the coronavirus. Michael Kappeler/picture alliance/Getty Images

Markus Söder, who heads the Christian Democrats’ sister party and, like Laschet, is vying to lead the country after Merkel retires following September elections, fired back: “Everybody who plans to profit from Merkel in September must know that these votes will only come in combination with Merkel’s policy and not by positioning oneself against it.”

Nearly a year before, Germans who turned on the news would typically see a united front from Merkel down to the local level. Now, with the start of an election year, they saw some of the country’s top politicians — and members of the chancellor’s own party — debating whether Merkel had the right idea to begin with.

Without a strong leader at the federal level, it fell more to the lower levels of government to make decisions about Covid-19 — federalism ran wild.

Yet these leaders didn’t always have fully developed visions. During the summer, Michael Kretschmer, the governor of the state of Saxony, argued that the initial lockdown shouldn’t have been so strict. He said there would be “no tightening” of restrictions in September. By December, Kretschmer not only backed Germany’s new lockdown but enacted even tighter restrictions across Saxony, saying, “We have to bring this country to rest.” In January, Kretschmer called for a February end to the lockdown. By the end of March, he at least briefly supported a stricter Easter lockdown.

Now multiply this 16 times over. That’s the political back-and-forth that has engulfed Germany during Covid-19.

As I’ve asked experts in and out of Germany if anything could have averted the country’s recent failures, I’ve been met with a lot of shrugs and caveats. In theory, Germany may have avoided its second and third waves if the country continued to unite under Merkel — that worked in the first wave, and it’s an approach that seemed to work in much more consistent countries like Australia and New Zealand.

But German solidarity had major systemic forces stacked against it: a federalist system, a political battle to replace Merkel as head of the government, and a long pandemic that fatigued populations across Europe and the rest of the globe.

Countries might be able to overcome one or two of these factors at once — Australia has a federalist system; New Zealand had general elections in 2020 — but it could be that the full trifecta is too difficult to beat simultaneously.

The crisis “became more of a cooperation problem, in which everyone has a strong incentive to deviate from a common solution,” Hattke, of the University of Hamburg, said.

Some experts also argue Germany could have better used the time it bought with lockdowns and restrictions. It could have built more expansive test-and-trace systems to handle a higher caseload before the fall. Or it could have tried to procure some of its own vaccine supply, instead of relying on the EU’s ultimately botched approach — an approach that has left Germany with roughly half as many of its people receiving at least one vaccine dose as the US, and a third as many as world leader Israel, as of April 19.

“That time wasn’t used to put strategies in place that would support Germany in a second, third, or fourth wave, or whatever’s coming,” Kickbusch, of the Graduate Institute, said. “It was clear that Germany’s health system was very good — hospital beds and all of that. But Germany’s public health system was much too weak.”

As the lockdown that began in November drags on and officials clash over it, public opinion has shifted. Shortly after Merkel’s primetime speech in March 2020, only 14 percent of the German population called the Covid-19 restrictions excessive; a year later, 35 percent said the measures in place were too much, according to public surveys.

“We interpret this with the fact that politicians were less unified in their statements [and] stopped speaking with one voice,” Rolf van Dick, a social psychologist at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, told me, citing his own research on Covid-19 and public opinion. As politicians split in their public stances, van Dick added, the public “got more fragmented.”

Even Merkel eventually caved. In the lead-up to Easter on April 4, Merkel and the governors had agreed to tight restrictions — discouraging domestic travel, closing down more businesses, and prohibiting larger gatherings, including in churches, from April 1 to 5.

The backlash was fierce. Churches demanded the ability to celebrate one of their holiest days. Businesses claimed that a stricter lockdown during a typically busy season would bring financial ruin. State leaders started to buckle under the opposition, calling for a redo on the agreement.

Under all this pressure, Merkel revoked the plan roughly 36 hours after it was announced. “This mistake is mine alone,” she said. “The whole process has caused additional uncertainty, for which I ask all citizens to forgive me.” Merkel added, “There were good reasons for it, but it could not be implemented well enough in this short time.”

One year before, Merkel had been the voice of Germany on Covid-19, with news of her speeches getting families to gather around the TV to listen to what she had to say. The public and politicians followed her lead, anxious to take the cautious approach that she advocated for against the coronavirus. That unity let the country crush Covid-19 during the early days of the pandemic, with headlines praising “A German Exception” and much of Germany, from restaurants to movie theaters, reopening and bustling in the summer.

In the spring of 2021, Merkel was forced to apologize for her caution. Now she hopes to adjust her plan to prevent another potential surge — perhaps by seizing powers originally held by the states. Meanwhile, daily new Covid-19 cases in Germany remain around 50 times higher than they were for much of last summer.

Jacobia Dahm is an independent photographer based in Berlin, with a focus on portraiture and reportage.

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A power vacuum made things even worse

Written by Zakrzewskidorothy