RIP Margaret Thatcher, and how Angela Merkel is different

When Angela Merkel first came into office, a lot of people were quick to compare her to Margaret Thatcher. I can only see that as a symptom for the fact that there are still hardly any women in leadership roles, be that in business or in politics. Angela Merkel is now on the last leg of her second term as Chancellor – and so a comparison at least can be based on some facts. Is there anything Ms. Merkel has in common with the first woman to have held such office in Western Europe? 
 

At first glance the two women couldn’t be more different. For one thing Angela Merkel never carries a handbag, and she is not known for melodrama. Margaret Thatcher liked grand oratory, and in her best moments excelled in it, Angela Merkel never sounds like anything but a Kindergarten teacher. 

Thatcher polarized her country, people either thought she was God’s answer to its problems or that she was Satan’s personal envoy. This extended to the film that was made about her recently: Quite a few people in the UK refused to see it because they hated Thatcher so much that Meryl Streep’s superb acting was lost on them. Merkel on the other hand keeps on bobbing on wavelets of lukewarm approval from voters and opponents alike. 

Now that it has been some time that Lady Thatcher was in office there is some testimony from people who had encounters with her behind closed doors and who have not hesitated to spill the beans about her leadership style. No doubt Meryl Streep has used these memoirs when she prepared for her impersonation. We do not have this kind of testimony about Angela Merkel yet, because the ones she chased away to where they could no longer question her as party leader are still active in their new positions and have other things to do. 

One thing the two women have in common, though, is TINA. We don’t have such a nice acronym in German for “There Is No Alternative”, but Ms. Merkel has given us the adjective “alternativlos”, “alternative-less”. She was slapped for it by the Society for the German Language who declared it “non-word of the year” in 2011. The Society elects such a non-word every year. “alternativlos” shares the honor with words like “betriebsratsverseucht” (“union-infested”, 2010). 

But even though Merkel seems to reign with an iron fist, as suggested by words such as “alternativlos”, nobody seems to hate her for it the way Thatcher was hated by roughly one half of the British electorate. In fact, it seems a foregone conclusion that Angela Merkel will win a third term in office in the general election scheduled for September 22. Some of us think we ought to have a two-term limit on any office like the US and other countries, but that is probably more because we remember how Helmut Kohl served four terms and had the nerve to run for a fifth in 1998. 

So Merkel remains a mystery. Part of the reason for Kohl’s continued success is the alternatives that were offered by the Social Democrats in 1990 and 1994 – Oskar Lafontaine and Rudolf Scharping respectively. I think even those of us who voted for them because we wanted to get rid of Helmut Kohl are now glad that we didn’t succeed. 

But I digress. What I wonder about is will Merkel win a third term in office because people just don’t hate her enough or because Peer Steinbrück can’t seem to make a public statement without putting his foot in his mouth?