Editor's Note: As Angela Merkel enters her last year as Chancellor, her legacy remains oddly inconclusive, but the coming U.S. election may present her with a fateful choice between rebuilding trans-Atlantic relations or seeking refuge in the East, argues Constanze Stelzenmüller. This post originally appeared in the Internationale Politik Quarterly.
It is mortifying to have to begin a column with a confession about one’s worst-ever prognosis. But in October 2005, I wrote for the Financial Times about the recent German election: “Ms. Merkel’s grand coalition … is merely an interregnum arrangement. With luck, it will last two years.”
I may or may not have added, “Ms. Merkel might turn out to be a dead woman walking: a leader beginning the end of her career rather than ending the beginning.”
Chancellor Angela Merkel is now entering the last year of her fourth and—she vows—final term in office.
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