n 2014, the battle for Europe’s future has been fought between two leaders: Russian president Vladimir Putin and German chancellor Angela Merkel. The contrast between them could not be sharper. There the Russian man: macho, militarist, practitioner of the Soviet-style big lie.
The German woman: gradualist, quietly plain-speaking, consensus-building, strongest on economic power, patiently steering a slow-moving, sovereignty-sharing, multinational European tortoise.
Merkel has long been recognised as Europe’s leading politician, but this year, during the crisis over Ukraine, she became its leading stateswoman.
At the beginning of this year, German president Joachim Gauck, an east German Protestant, appealed for Merkel to assume more leadership responsibility in Europe. She has. As a schoolgirl, Mrekel won East Germany’s Russian-language Olympiad. On her office wall, she has a portrait of the Pomeranian princess who became Empress Catherine the Great of Russia. She can speak to Putin in Russian, as he can to her in German.
Both were in east Germany in 1989 – he as a KGB officer, she as a young scientist – and the lessons they drew were diametrically opposed. in this European crisis, two profound, personal commitments of her generation have come to the fore: to peace and to freedom.
Recently Merkel excoriated what Putin has done in Ukraine: “Who would have thought it possible that 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall … something like this could happen in the middle of Europe?” International law can not be trampled underfoot
Merkel has talked to Putin more than any other world leader has: 35 phone calls in the first eight months of this year. She is also the world leader to whom the American president has spoken most often.
As she never tires of repeating, her strategy has three prongs: support for Ukraine, diplomacy with Russia and sanctions to bring Putin to the negotiating table. She has led rather than followed German public opinion. She has faced down the so-called Putinversteher – those who show such “understanding” for Putin’s actions that they come close to excusing them. She has made the larger arguments, from history, about Europe, and they have resonated.
What is more, she has made the case for sanctions powerfully to more reluctant members of the EU. The battle of Europe is far from over. In Russia, deepening economic crisis will not necessarily translate into more accommodating policy.. Russian military planes have flown into the air space of Baltic Nato members.
Yet as 2014 draws to a close, it is clear that Angela Merkel has been the stateswoman of the year.
