Angela Merkel was awarded Germany’s highest civil honour at a ceremony in Berlin on Monday for serving her country “ambitiously, intelligently and passionately”.
Praise for the honour was mixed with ambivalence and criticism, in particular over the former chancellor’s mixed record on energy security and Russia.
President Frank-Walter Steinmeier presented Germany’s federal cross of merit in its highest form to Dr Merkel for her “tireless efforts” to “uphold freedom, democracy, the wellbeing of our country and the prosperity of its people ... at times at the limits of your physical strength.
“Through your chancellorship, you ensured that a female head of government, and a woman wielding power, will always be a matter of course in our country,” he told Dr Merkel, the first former East German in the chancellery.
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Mr Steinmeier said the 68-year-old’s “exceptionally long time in office” was, in part, due to “how you so convincingly used the experiences you gained during the dictatorship to strengthen democracy”.
As a Merkel cabinet member for eight years, Mr Steinmeier said the ex-chancellor had three strengths: her reliance on – and acceptance of – facts, in particular when they changed; her skills at negotiation and compromise; and her firm guard of the principles of the German state.
Her ability to stand her ground, the president said, had helped Europe retain its single currency “and emerge from the euro crisis with a black eye but no lasting damage”.
He added: “At a time when our Continent threatened to fall apart, you kept the centre and periphery together.”
But the award comes as Germany argues over the Merkel era. Berlin’s new three-way coalition, led by the Social Democratic Party (SPD), has framed her four-term reign – which the SDP supported for three terms – as an era of standstill in security and social policy.
Many right-wingers in her Christian Democratic Union (CDU), meanwhile, have framed her political style as a sell-out of the centre-right party’s traditional conservative values.
Deputy CDU leader Carsten Linnemann called Dr Merkel’s liberal refugee legacy a “blatant failure” for “not protecting borders”, adding that her decision to abolish nuclear energy after the Fukushima incident – a step completed on Sunday – was “not thought through”.
Dr Merkel, who was born in Hamburg but raised north of Berlin in East Germany, put aside her career as a physicist in 1990 to become a politician in the united Germany. She became CDU leader in 2000 and chancellor five years later, beginning a 16-year run in office managing crises over banks, the euro and refugees – and a global pandemic.
Rather than run for a fifth term, she stood down in December 2021, 10 days short of breaking the record for holding power of Helmut Kohl, her political mentor.
But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, 10 weeks after she retired, has raised uncomfortable questions about her approach to Moscow – in particular Germany’s dependency on Russian gas.
In post-retirement interviews, Dr Merkel has defended her record but conceded that she did not respond adequately to Russian aggression by boosting German defence spending to the Nato minimum.
Pressed to admit she got it wrong on Vladimir Putin, she said last December: “It would be a damning indictment, just for some peace, for me to say – without feeling it – ‘of course, now I see, that I was wrong’.”
In Bellevue Palace on Monday, Mr Steinmeier said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had forced German leaders to “reconsider our positions, to also think the apparently unthinkable”.
“Today, we have to think differently, we have to act differently,” he said.
Accepting her award, Dr Merkel thanked all who had made her four terms possible, adding: “It’s often said what a vipers’ nest politics is. Well, I wouldn’t have survived if there wasn’t another side.”