On October 29, 2018, a day after the Christian Democrats in the State of Hesse suffered double-digit election losses, German Chancellor Angela Merkel told a meeting of the CDU executive council that she would not stand again as candidate to head her party.
“Angela Merkel is the first postwar German chancellor who managed to succeed where most politicians fail: to end her extraordinary career at a time of her own choosing, neither failing at the ballot box nor being pushed out by impatient internal rivals,” notes Henning Hoff from International Politik Quarterly.
But when making the decision to end her extraordinary political career — with three decades as a member of the Bundestag and winning four national elections for her conservative Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union — Merkel probably did not anticipate such a turbulent and bitter end to her long chancellorship.
Admired at times as the most powerful woman leader in the world, her record of managing to stay on top of so many crises and upheavals didn’t help her in the end.
As Germany’s election weekend approached, The Economist, in their cover story, didn’t look back kindly at Merkel’s sixteen years. Their headline? “The mess Merkel leaves behind —As a much admired chancellor bows out, her successors will face big unresolved problems.” We couldn´t but to agree.
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