• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

While political commentators outside Germany have often compared her to the former UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher, Merkel’s leadership style rarely has the bite of Britain’s ‘Iron Lady’ (although some state heads, like France’s Nicolas Sarkozy and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, might disagree on that). What Thatcher and Merkel do have in common, though, is that both have ranked among the Forbes 100 most powerful women in the world – Angela Merkel has topped the list no less than three times.

* * *

The unified Germany of today with 16 states (five of which are in eastern Germany and called the ‘new states’) was hammered out after volatile political debate at home and a series of treaties to end post-WWII occupation zones. The days of occupation by the four powers were now consigned to the past. Berlin acquired the status it has today of a separate city-state and, following reunification on 3 October 1990, it was restored as the capital of Germany.

The single most dominant figure throughout reunification and the 1990s was Helmut Kohl, whose CDU/CSU and FDP coalition was re-elected to office in December 1990 in Germany’s first postreunification election.

* * *

Germany is a constitutional democracy with a president and bicameral system based on the Bundestag (popularly elected lower house of 598 members) and the Bundesrat (upper house of delegates nominated by 16 states).

* * *

Under Kohl’s leadership, East German assets were privatised; oversubsidised state industries were radically trimmed back, sold or wound up completely; and infrastructure was modernised (and in some cases over-invested in) to create a unification boom that saw the former East Germany grow by up to 10% each year until 1995. Growth slowed dramatically from the mid-1990s, however, creating an eastern Germany that consisted of unification winners and losers. Those who had jobs did well, but unemployment was high and the lack of opportunities in regions such as the eastern Harz Mountains or in cities such as Magdeburg and Halle (both in Saxony-Anhalt) are still causing many young people from the former East Germany to try their luck in western Germany or in boom towns, such as Leipzig in Saxony. Berlin, although economically shaky, is the exception. Many public servants have since relocated there from Bonn to staff the ministries, and young people from all over Germany are attracted by its vibrant cultural scene.

Helmut Kohl also sought to bring former East German functionaries to justice, notably Erich Honecker, who fled after he resigned and lived an ailing and nomadic existence that culminated in his death in Chile in 1994. His court case had by then been abandoned due to his ill health.

The unification legacy of Helmut Kohl is indisputable. His involvement in a party slush-fund scandal in the late 1990s, however, financially burdened his own party and resulted in the CDU stripping him of his position as lifelong honorary chairman. In 1998, a coalition of the SPD and Bündnis 90/Die Grünen (Alliance 90/The Greens) parties defeated the CDU/CSU and FDP coalition.

Return to beginning of chapter

THE NEW MILLENNIUM

With the formation of a coalition government of SPD and Alliance 90/The Greens in 1998, Germany reached a new milestone. This was the first time an environmentalist party had governed nationally – in Germany or elsewhere in the world. Two figures dominated the seven-year rule of the coalition: Chancellor Gerhard Schröder (b 1944) and the Greens party vice-chancellor and foreign minister Joschka Fischer (b 1948). Schröder’s role model was Willy Brandt; Fischer’s – because he was the Greens party’s first minister in the job – was, by necessity, himself. Despite his provenance from the left-wing house-squatting scene in Frankfurt am Main of the 1970s, he enjoyed widespread popularity among ordinary Germans of all political colours.

* * *

A man, it would seem, for a financial crisis, Horst Köhler headed the International Monetary Fund (IMF), based in Washington DC, before becoming postwar Germany