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Two women GDP EUEUEU Your browser does not support the element.have thoroughly dominated the politics of their respective northern European countries in living memory. Beyond their gender, Angela Merkel and Margaret Thatcher are often lumped together as centre-right stalwarts with a knack for political survival. They governed very differently—one menacingly wielding her handbag, the other patiently cajoling coalition partners—but for so long that by the time they stepped down even teenagers could not recall anyone else having been in charge. But their legacies look more different still. Though Thatcher was forced out by her own party in 1990 as her poll numbers slid, she has since topped a poll of Britain’s best post-war leaders; Sir Keir Starmer, the current prime minister, last month faced brickbats for merely moving the portrait of his predecessor-but-eight to a different part of Downing Street. Mrs Merkel opted to retire after four terms, still so popular that both her party’s candidate and the opposition fellow (now in office) tried to claim her mantle. Yet every month that goes by brings a reminder of how her reign propelled Germany into the mire.The Iron Frau’s legacy will come into focus on November 26th as she releases her 736-page memoirs. What would once have been a lap of honour (along with a few obligatory digs at former political foes) will need to adopt a rather more defensive tone instead. Just about every big decision taken by Mrs Merkel now seems to have resulted in Germany—and often the entire European Union—ending up worse off. Geopolitically she left the country with a now-famous trifecta of dangerous dependencies: unable to defend itself without America, struggling to grow without exporting to China, relying on Russian gas to keep its industry going. The report card on the economy is if anything more damning: 16 years of muddling through with no reforms has left Germany once again the economic sick man of Europe.What went wrong? “Vladimir Putin” is one pithy answer. The Russian president’s decision to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 showed that Germany’s ill-preparedness was not just a theoretical pitfall. Mrs Merkel had cultivated Mr Putin, speaking to him regularly (that they spoke each other’s languages helped). She will no doubt repeat in her memoirs that she never trusted him, then remind the world of how she led the movement to impose sanctions on Russia after its invasion of Ukraine in 2014.Even the sleepiest reviewer, however, will wonder why German defence spending stayed at a measly 1.3% or so of throughout her time in office. Worse, why did she allow Russian gas to make up an ever-bigger slice of German consumption—even allowing a new pipeline from Russia to be built 2014? Beyond being iffy for the planet, Mrs Merkel’s impetuous call to turn off Germany’s remaining nuclear power plants after the Fukushima meltdown in 2011 left the country even more hooked on Russia. But why question German ways when the place seemed to be running like a well-oiled machine? China soaked up its exports, glad to face few questions over human rights, while Germany failed to worry about getting hooked on another autocratic regime.Much of the book will doubtless deal with her time attending—in practice all but running— summits. By Charlemagne’s calculations she sat through over 100 of them, spending as many hours in windowless Brussels meeting rooms as the average German works in an entire year. And for what? It was here that the cruel-but-deserved new verb (to put off big decisions for as long as possible) really came into its own. Whatever immediate crisis was handled was for the most part dealt with sensibly, if not always from Greece’s perspective, though often only after having been made worse by months of inaction. Yet the focus on putting out fires meant nobody focused enough on the future. Yes, the was kept in one piece (minus Britain). But in what shape?Three big pitfalls have become obvious. The has been made more fragile by the democratic backsliding of some of its members, most notably Hungary. Mrs Merkel deserves lots of blame here, as she shielded its budding autocrat Viktor Orban from criticism for reasons of lazy convenience (Hungary is tied in to German industrial supply chains). The second is how Europe turned out to be on the economic slow track. A recent report by Mario Draghi, a former prime minister of Italy, excoriated European economic policymaking, pointing out how far the continent had fallen behind America. Finally, her kindness towards migrants, all but inviting over a million Syrians and others to Germany in 2015, while laudable, led to a political backlash that has helped fuel the rise of the hard right in Germany and elsewhere.There is an irony in how things turned out. Germany nagged southern Europeans into austerity, but now its own pinchingways look misguided. A constitutional amendment limiting budget deficits, dating from Mrs Merkel’s time in 2009, has resulted in chronic underinvestment in public services. Spending that could have been done at 0% interest might have made Germany fit for the 21st century. Instead, bridges are literally collapsing and the train system is due to previous neglect.Those wondering how Europe ended up in its current pickle will rightly look to Mrs Merkel’s stint in charge. But Germans might use the launch of her memoirs to do their own soul-searching. They are the ones who voted time and again to put off reforms of the sort undertaken in the early 2000s by Mrs Merkel’s predecessor, Gerhard Schröder (though the less said about his legacy after leaving office, as a well-paid pal of Mr Putin’s, the better). For Mrs Merkel’s part, she led Germany as if in a make-believe world, letting it enjoy an extended geopolitical and economic nap from which it still needs to wake up.
