Stability and Its Price

In the spring of 2026, Angela Merkel is back. Her memoir Freedom, written with Beate Baumann and published in November 2024, sold more than 200,000 copies in its first week and was the third best-selling book of the year. She appears, she is celebrated, she is shared. In the same country, her successor Friedrich Merz polls approval ratings between 13 and 18 percent, and the AfD has overtaken the Union as the strongest party. Out of this contrast grows a claim one now hears everywhere: things were better then. Sixteen years — a success.

We do not mean to dismiss this claim but to test it at its strongest point. Cheap criticism picks the convenient facts and stays silent about the inconvenient ones. We do the opposite. We call the defence witnesses ourselves — the upswing, the black zero, the successful integration — and examine whether they bear the verdict expected of them. They do not.

The Upswing She Did Not Create

The first defence witness is the economy. Under Merkel, the number of unemployed fell from nearly five million to around 2.3 million before the pandemic. This is true, and it is no small thing.

Except: she did not create this upswing. Its foundation was the labour-market reforms of Agenda 2010 — the work of her predecessor Gerhard Schröder, whose effect unfolded during her tenure. After the early years, Merkel added almost no structural impulse of her own; the corporate-tax reform of 2008 and the debt brake of 2009 were followed by what even the ifo Institute, in its assessment of the era, calls a decline in the willingness to reform — above all in tax and social policy. A government that lives for sixteen years off its predecessor's reform and adds none of its own has not earned its prosperity. It has consumed it. The upswing is not her achievement but her alibi.

The Black Zero: A Reserve Built from Decay

The second, stronger defence witness is the “black zero” — the balanced budget without new debt. From 2014, carried by Finance Minister Schäuble, the federal government posted balanced books. And the defence is not absurd: this solidity gave the state the room, during the pandemic, to counter-steer massively without shaking confidence in its solvency. We concede this fully.

But let us ask where the surplus came from. It came from the refusal to renew. For years, net public investment was negative — the state built and maintained less than its existing infrastructure wore out. The KfW municipal survey put the municipal investment backlog alone at around 159 billion euros in 2018, of which roughly 48 billion was in schools. The Rahmede viaduct on the A45, a main artery of freight traffic, was closed in 2021; its demolition and rebuilding will take years. The railway runs with delay rates that would count as a scandal in Switzerland, on a network underfunded for decades. That is the bill standing behind the zero.

With this, the defence collapses. A reserve that arises only because one lets bridges rot and schools age is not financial solidity. It is deferred decay disguised as prudence. The room of 2020 was paid for with the bridges of 2030. Nothing was saved — the costs were merely shifted to where they appear in no budget.

Energy: A Theory Without Proof

On energy there is no defence witness, only a rationale that has refuted itself. In 2010 Merkel's government extended the running times of the nuclear plants; after Fukushima in 2011 it reversed this decision within weeks — a country without earthquake or tsunami risk reacting to a tsunami in Japan. The resulting gap was bridged with Russian gas. Nord Stream 1 went online in 2011; Nord Stream 2 was driven forward against the explicit warnings of the United States, Poland and Ukraine — after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, after the downing of MH17, after the Salisbury poisoning. By 2021, Germany drew more than half of its natural gas from Russia.

The justification was called change through trade — a theory for which there was no historical evidence. As late as October 2021, Merkel declared there were no signs that Russia was using gas as a means of pressure. A few months later, in February 2022, precisely this dependency was the country's greatest strategic vulnerability; Nord Stream 2 was halted and never went into operation. Here nothing can be softened. The warnings were on the table, for years, from allies. They were not overlooked but rejected.

Migration: The Witness the Sharpest Critics Avoid

Now the most uncomfortable defence witness — the one a merely polemical reckoning would rather not call at all, because its testimony disturbs. The common charge is that, after taking in around 890,000 asylum seekers in 2015, Merkel failed to organise integration. Measured against the data, this charge is false.

The Institute for Employment Research showed in 2024: 64 percent of those who arrived in 2015 were employed, against 70 percent in the general population; including the self-employed, the employment rate is around 70 percent. Nine of ten of these jobs were subject to social-insurance contributions. The unemployment rate among people from asylum-origin countries fell from 52 percent in mid-2016 to 28 percent by the end of 2024. Whoever claims that “We can do this” failed economically is arguing against the statistics. We say so explicitly, because a watertight critique must name the exonerating figures before it goes on.

And now we go on. For the question was never only economic. In the same period a structural rift opened in the political fabric: the AfD entered the Bundestag in 2017 and is the strongest party in 2026. The competence of a government is measured also by whether it carries society with it — not only the labour market. Here the real failure appears, and it is subtler than the false charge it replaces. Integration succeeded slowly — it took around nine years —, unevenly — 76 percent among men, only 35 among women — and, this the decisive finding, worst of all where right-wing mobilisation was loudest. The same studies prove the link: rejection makes harder the very integration it claims to criticise. The labour market caught up; the republic did not. Economic integration succeeded — political processing failed, and the two cannot be separated.

The Standstill No One Defends

Where no defence witness remains, the pattern lies open. Germany slept through digitalisation; Merkel's remark about the internet as “uncharted territory” in 2013 became a byword, because in 2021 health offices were still reporting Covid figures by fax. The armed forces remained chronically underfunded; the NATO target of two percent of economic output, pledged after the annexation of Crimea, was not met throughout her entire tenure. The hundred-billion-euro special fund her successor proclaimed in 2022 as a “turning point” was no turning point — it was the bill for sixteen years of neglect, made out to the one who came after her.

The Verdict

Let us add up the sum. The upswing was borrowed. The black zero was financed from decay. The energy policy rested on a refuted theory. Integration succeeded economically and failed politically. The rest was standstill. Each single defence witness, taken at its word, does not exonerate — it merely moves the charge onto firmer ground. What appeared to be a balance sheet of successes turns out, on closer questioning, to be a balance sheet of deferral: to govern by postponing the decision, calmly, until someone else has to make it.

This also explains the longing of 2026 without succumbing to it. What Germans miss is not the substance of this politics — the substance was, to a large extent, the resolve not to decide. What is missed is the form: the calm, the not-jumping-at-every-stick, the composure in crisis. A bearing, not a content. That this form is absent today says more about her successors than about her.

Merkel herself has all but admitted the pattern. If it helps, she said, then she was to blame too — only to add at once that this does not describe things adequately. Precisely there lies the method: not to let the verdict land. We let it land. It is not a partisan verdict and no matter of taste. It is the sum of the deferrals — and it is now due.