It will probably take a while for the fact that Angela Merkel is no longer Germany’s chancellor to sink in. It is hard to remember life before ‘Mutti’. When she came to power in 2005, no one had heard of YouTube. iPhones didn’t exist. The global crash of 2008 wasn’t on anyone’s radar.
Merkel has been a beacon of consistency in a world that has bucked wildly from one crisis to another for over a decade, and she has become an icon of centrist stability in a time of extremes.
But while it’s true that Merkel’s Germany has been relatively stable throughout the chaos in European and world politics over the past 15 years – Europe’s instability has in part been fuelled by Merkel’s strict insistence on sticking to the fiscal rules that have dictated the policies of the Eurozone since its inception.
