Sixteen Years Without a Creed

I. The Control Group

This series asks which ideologies and mentors stand behind those in power. Behind Putin stands Ivan Ilyin, behind Thiel René Girard, behind Xi Jinping Wang Huning. But such a series has a problem: it cannot prove that an ideology achieves anything at all as long as it only examines rulers who have one. A doctor who wants to know whether a medicine works needs a group that does not receive it. We need a head of government without a doctrine.

Angela Merkel is the purest case Europe has to offer in this century. Sixteen years as chancellor, and no book she invoked, no teacher whose sentences she repeated, no programme she defended over the years. Her memoirs are called “Freedom”. The word is a value, not a doctrine. We passed judgement on her record in “Stability and Its Price”. Here the question is a different one: what guides when no mentor guides?

II. What Took the Place of Doctrine

Merkel grew up in the GDR as the daughter of a Protestant pastor. From there she brought two things: the experience that grand ideologies lie, and the ability to move within a system without professing anything. She studied physics and earned her doctorate at the Academy of Sciences. The physicist does not believe in programmes; she measures, changes one variable, measures again. “Thinking from the end” became her best-known way of working.

She had a patron, but no teacher. Helmut Kohl brought the young woman from the East into his cabinet as a minister in 1991; she was mockingly called “Kohl’s girl”. When Kohl fell in the party donations scandal, she wrote in the “Frankfurter Allgemeine” in December 1999 that the party had to learn to walk without him. With that she publicly dismissed her patron. Whoever begins like that binds herself to no one. Her closest confidante for over three decades was her office manager Beate Baumann, not a thinker with a programme, but an adviser in the use of power.

III. Leipzig, and What She Learned from It

Once Merkel tried a creed. At the Leipzig party conference in December 2003 the CDU under her leadership adopted a reform programme: a flat-rate premium for health insurance, a radical simplification of taxes. In the 2005 campaign she presented the tax lawyer Paul Kirchhof as her future finance minister, with a single tax rate for everyone. A few weeks before the election the Union stood at around 41 percent in the polls. On election night it was 35.2. The Leipzig reforms, according to the election researchers, were perceived as socially unbalanced and rejected by the majority.

Merkel became chancellor nonetheless, and she never forgot the lesson. A creed costs votes. After 2005 she never again presented a major programme. Election researchers coined a term of its own for her campaigns: “asymmetric demobilisation”. One avoids every contentious issue so that the opponent’s supporters have no reason to vote. The aim in 2009, as the election researcher Matthias Jung described it, was for disappointed SPD supporters to stay at home. It worked.

IV. Without Alternative

Whoever has no ideology still needs a justification. A doctrine explains why a decision is right. Whoever has none must find another way to end contradiction. Merkel’s way was a word. In the euro crisis she called her rescue policy again and again “alternativlos”, without alternative. The language critics of the “Un-word of the Year” campaign chose it as the un-word of 2010, on the grounds that the word suggests “in an objectively inappropriate way that there are no alternatives in a decision-making process from the outset”, and thus no need for discussion either.

The word has a prehistory that reveals its character. In the 1980s Margaret Thatcher defended her policy with “There is no alternative”. With Thatcher there was a doctrine behind it, market liberalism, and one could argue about it. With Merkel there was nothing behind it. “Without alternative” was the doctrine of those without doctrine: it replaced the justification a mentor would have supplied with the claim that there was nothing to justify. In “The Thwarted Benefactor” we wrote: “An idea one holds to be without alternative is no longer a hypothesis, it is a faith.” With Merkel it was the other way round. She had no faith, and the word lent her decisions the unassailability of a faith. On 1 September 2011 she said of the euro rescue that ways would be found “to shape parliamentary co-determination in such a way that it is nevertheless also market-conforming”. Not the market was to conform to democracy, but democracy to the market. In “Die marktkonforme Demokratie” (German) and in “Which Democracy?” we asked what that sentence reveals about the order of rank.

V. The Turns

Without a doctrine one can change course quickly. In autumn 2010 her government extended the operating lives of the nuclear power plants. In March 2011, after Fukushima, she shut down eight plants and in the summer decided on the exit by 2022. Also in 2011 conscription was suspended, a pillar of conservative politics. In 2015 came the minimum wage her party had long rejected. In late summer 2015 she opened the border to the refugees from Budapest. And in June 2017 she said at a discussion event of the magazine “Brigitte” that marriage for all was a question of conscience. Four days later the Bundestag passed it. Merkel herself voted against.

Each of these turns can be defended individually, and some were right. But together they show what a government without doctrine is: a ship without a keel. It turns quickly, but it holds no course. What determines the direction is no longer the helmsman but the wind.

VI. What Guided Where No One Guided

The wind had names. The first was the public mood. Merkel was considered a chancellor who read opinion polls as others read editorials, and where a majority moved clearly, she moved with it. The second was the influence of those who stood close enough to power. In 2013 she intervened personally in Brussels to prevent stricter emission limits for the heavy cars of German manufacturers. We described in “With Friends Like These, Who Needs Enemies” how this closeness works. The third was the convenience of postponing: bridges, railways, the armed forces, digitalisation, everything that costs money today and brings benefit only tomorrow.

Here a pattern emerges. Where the public was watching, on nuclear power, conscription and marriage for all, Merkel followed the mood. Where the public was not watching, on the euro rescues, the dependence on Russian gas, the emission limits, she decided in a small circle and called the result without alternative. The absence of doctrine was not neutral. It had two faces, one for the audience and one for those who sat at the table. In “Central-Power Orientation” we therefore described Merkel as “gradually shifted”: balancing on the outside, central in the practice of the chancellery.

VII. The Finding for the Series

The control group delivers a clear result. Where no mentor speaks, no empty space arises. Others speak: the poll, the lobbyist, habit. A doctrine is dangerous because it binds people against reality, as Ilyin’s teaching binds Putin. But its absence is not harmless. It leaves leadership to those who were not elected and owe no account.

Wang Huning, whom we described in “The Embedded Mentor”, is the opposite pole: a thinker who himself sits at the top and supplied three party leaders with their guiding concepts. With Merkel no one sat in that place. The place was not empty. It was unlabelled. Only once, in September 2011, did Merkel read the label aloud herself: what it said was the market.

VIII. How This Essay Could Be Refuted

The strongest objection: precisely the absence of doctrine saved Germany from worse. Whoever has no ideology does not pursue it into the abyss. In the financial crisis of 2008 Merkel stood before the cameras with her finance minister and declared savings deposits safe, and the run on the banks did not happen. While other countries split into camps, Germany remained stable. And whoever follows the majority, as on marriage for all, does not do the worst thing in a democracy.

There is much truth in this, and we do not agree on its weight. One of us passed a clear judgement in “Which Democracy?”: Merkel represented a democracy as her clientele wished it to be. The other judges more cautiously: the stability was a real achievement, but its price was deferred and is now due. We agree on the finding of this series: the absence of doctrine is not neutrality.

The essay would be refuted if it could be shown that the great decisions of the Merkel years came about without the influence of moods and interest groups, that is, as the word “without alternative” claimed.

IX. Proportion Without Passion

Max Weber demanded both of the politician at the same time, passion and a sense of proportion. Merkel had a sense of proportion like few before her. The passion, the commitment to a cause for which one might also lose an election, she gave up after Leipzig. For sixteen years the board was measured; it was seldom bored.

If the mentor’s seat remains empty: who then sits in it, and why does no one ask his name?