On Tuesday, German chancellor Angela Merkel goes back to her roots as a scientist with a very public experiment.
Her subject: Ivanka Trump. Her thesis: the way to the most powerful man in the world’s heart is not via his stomach, but through his daughter. Donald Trump may love chocolate cake, but he loves his elder daughter more.
Armed with this information, Dr Merkel has pulled off a political coup by inviting the self-described US first daughter to Berlin on Tuesday for the Women20 summit, a women’s empowerment meeting organised as part of Germany’s G20 presidency.
Three months before Trump comes to Hamburg for the main G20 summit, his 35-year-old daughter will share a Berlin stage with Merkel, Queen Máxima of the Netherlands, International Monetary Fund president Christine Lagarde, Canadian foreign minister Chrystia Freeland and others. The two-day conference will focus on boosting women’s inclusion in the workplace and underline the importance of “diversity and full participation . . . for fostering the resilient, sustainable and viable growth of stable economies and societies”.
Passed over
Given that, why invite a woman whose father’s US immigration plans undermine diversity, who bragged about “grabbing women by the pussy” and who passed over his daughter and her many qualifications – businesswoman, Tiger mother of three, society hostess and Instagram star – to appoint his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as special White House adviser?
Undeterred at having no formal White House role, Trump told People magazine that, while her father "makes up his own mind", "I am his daughter, though, so I will give him feedback, solicited or unsolicited."
And this is her value to Merkel: to use her as a way into the Oval Office. The chancellor will possibly tell Ms Trump of her own faltering steps into public life in 1989 – a humiliating apprenticeship in the shadow of another outsized male figure, as chancellor Helmut Kohl's Mädchen.
A decade later Merkel liberated herself – and snatched leadership of their Christian Democratic Union (CDU) – by knifing her political mentor in a newspaper article, denouncing Kohl for accepting illegal political donations.
Love-hate figure
But while IMF chief Christine Lagarde has attracted praise for making empowerment of women a key part of her mandate, Merkel is a love-hate figure among German women. The country’s first woman leader was raised in East Germany, where women were expected to work, and opposes workplace quotas for women.
A 2013 poll for German womens magazine Emma found that just a third of German women saw her as a role model, while 39 per cent dismissed her work for gender equality as "inadequate".
Given her mixed record, perhaps the German leader is the ideal person to induct Ivanka Trump into the Powerfrau hall of fame.
Even before Tuesday’s experiment begins, it appears to be yielding results. Asked about their White House meeting last month, where he appeared to snub the chancellor’s suggestion to shake hands, Donald Trump now remembers the Merkel meeting in glowing terms: “We had unbelievable chemistry.”
Merkel is a trained physicist, but it’s a start.
