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[The American Conservative] The Anatomy of Merkelism
Kati Marton’s paean to the four-term chancellor overlooks the contested aspects of her legacy.
The Chancellor: The Remarkable Odyssey of Angela Merkel. By Kati Marton. William Collins; 344 pages; $28.99.
You’ve heard it before, that special form of hubris indulged by politicians and their spin doctors when faced with defeat. “Ours was the better case,” they routinely boast in reference to their proposed candidate or policy, “we just didn’t message it well.” From British Remainers to American supporters of Hillary Clinton, political losers the world over have endlessly deployed this reasoning to make sense of their predicament. This is also how bestselling author Kati Marton deals with her subject’s most controversial legacy in The Chancellor: The Remarkable Odyssey of Angela Merkel (2021). In other words, she claims it was right for Merkel to suspend E.U.-wide asylum rules and welcome over one million migrants in 2015 alone, steamrolling the bloc’s smaller member states and domestic critics in the process. The only caveat? Not that the policy didn’t serve Germany’s best interests, but that Merkel didn’t message forcefully enough that it did.
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