In 1954, the threat of nuclear war was in the air. The US and the Soviet Union were locked in the Cold War. Their spheres of influence touched in Germany, where West Germany was a democracy and East Germany was a totalitarian Soviet satellite state. Between 1951 and mid-1955, around 1.5 million people fled oppressive East Germany to seek a better life in West Germany. One family went the opposite direction. The Lutheran church had put out a call for more pastors to come preach in the atheist Communist state of East Germany. Horst Kasner was one of very few pastors who heeded that call. He was expecting his first child at the time, but he departed for East Germany instead of sticking around for the child’s birth—before he married his wife, he had warned her: I love you, but my love for God will always come first. After giving birth, Mrs. Kasner took her newborn in a little basket from the western city of Hamburg to join her husband in a tiny village in East Germany.
They named their baby Angela Kasner. She would later become Angela Merkel, Chancellor of a united Germany.
Welcome to Women of Power, a podcast where we analyze the lives of powerful women and learn from their stories and strategies.
Today's episode is on Angela Merkel.
Forbes Magazine has ranked her as the most powerful woman in the world for 14 years. Within a year of entering politics, she went from being an obscure research scientist to being a member of both Parliament and the Cabinet. During her 16-year reign as Chancellor, she served as de facto leader of the EU and navigated it through economic crises, a refugee crisis, an aggressive Russia, and more. No matter what you may think of her policies, she is a powerful woman whose tactics we can all learn from. So, let’s continue her story.
Continuing the story
As a child, Angela was perfectionistic, disciplined, and high achieving. I’m sure part of that was just her natural personality, but part of it was also her dad’s sternness — Mr. Kasner held his children to extremely high standards, especially Angela, who was the eldest, and he rarely praised or showed he was satisfied with them.
And of course, part of her discipline was simply imposed by the authoritarian East German regime.
So even as a child, Angela was extremely meticulous about always being overprepared, double checking every answer, and ensuring she was never wrong—even as a child, her motto was “never show incompetence.” This, plus her natural intelligence, made her the best student in her class by quite a wide margin.
There’s one anecdote that people love to tell about her childhood - one day in school, the teacher invited the children to dive off of a 3 meter diving board - which is almost 10 feet off the ground. Angela was 9 years old, and she was terrified. For 45 minutes she paced up and down the length of the diving board, contemplating her decision. All the other kids were watching and sort of laughing, but she ignored them and kept thinking. And then she dove into the pool.
This is an early sign of two things about her character - first, she will take her time in making a decision. Furthermore, she understands herself well enough to allow herself to just take that time to think, without panicking or caving to pressure from people around her. Later in life, her political opponents would criticize and laugh at her for how much she procrastinated in decision making. But Angela consistently ignored these people, allowed herself to have these periods of contemplation, and usually emerges with a very clearly opinionated and confident stance.
Angela also displayed an early knack for understanding and getting along with people. As a kid, Angela often organized events and parties for her peers. In high school, she was itching to get to know more people and see more of the world, so she often went to East Berlin to go to museums and just talk to anyone she met on the streets.
When it was time to go to college, Angela decided to study physics, because even the brainwashing East German government couldn’t bend the laws of physics to conform to Marxism. Outside of school, she worked as a bartender at disco parties, and at one of those parties, she met her first husband, Ulrich Merkel. She and Ulrich got married in 1977 and divorced five years later, though she kept his last name. Angela was the one who initiated the divorce - similar to her time on the diving board, it seems that she had been unhappy and mulling over the decision for some time, but when she did decide on a divorce, it came as a surprise to Ulrich.
When they divorced, she was 28, living in East Berlin, working toward her PhD in quantum chemistry, squatting illegally in an empty apartment, having casual flings with various men, and traveling around Eastern Europe to different science conferences whenever she could. When her dad came to visit, he remarked, “wow, angela, you really haven’t come very far, have you?” Given their religious background, it was very embarrassing to him that she got divorced and was just living this sort of carefree life. And I’m sure that must’ve hurt to hear that from her father — her whole life, she had been so disciplined and high-achieving, striving for his approval which was so hard to earn — and I can imagine that that must’ve fueled the ambition that she displayed once she went into politics seven years later.
Regardless, at this point, her life seemed a bit stuck. Though she did get her PhD and a research job in East Berlin, she recognized that she wasn't talented or passionate enough to ever be at the very top of her field, and she was trapped in East Germany with no way to leave. I think this is a key point that's easy to forget. Angela was only seven years old when the Berlin Wall was built, completely obstructing travel to the West.
Since that time, virtually every East German believed that the Berlin Wall was permanent and that they would never again see democracy or capitalism or their loved ones in West Germany.
Then comes November 9th, 1989. Angela is 35 years old. The Berlin Wall falls. Hordes of East Germans swarm to the wall and stream into West Berlin.
It’s a greatly celebrated historical moment, and it also plunges both Germanys into a bit of chaos - everyone’s like, what now? Well, first, East Germany prepares to hold its first free election. Previously, they technically had elections, but somehow, by some great mystery, the communist party won over 90% of the vote every single time!
Angela Enters Politics
So in 1990, for the first time, a bunch of different political parties are campaigning earnestly, and Angela Merkel decides to join a campaign.
She picks a smallish political party called the DA, and starts off by just volunteering to hand out flyers to people.
At some point, the party needed a spokesperson. Angela saw that no one else was running for this position, so she took the opportunity to run uncontested and became the spokesperson for the DA.
The DA is a small party, so the they join forces with a couple of larger parties, including the CDU, the Christian Democratic Union, to form a coalition. Now the CDU does super well in the election, and so their coalition becomes the majority coalition in the new parliament.
Now that the parliament's been elected, and the CDU basically controls it, Angela starts networking like crazy with them. She squeezes her way into a bunch of their events and parties, often without an invitation. Whenever she manages to make a friend, she asks them to introduce her to another person. And she makes a great impression on everyone who she meets. So, when the CDU is picking their leadership team, they think of Merkel . They think, okay, she's from the DA party, that's good because they need a token DA person. She's a scientist, she's focused and disciplined, and she's a doer.
So, they make Angela Merkel the number two spokesperson for all of East Germany. This is a pattern that you see with successful people over and over again. They will see some small advantage that they can cling onto, and then turn that into a bigger advantage.
Pretty much immediately after the government is formed, the East and West German governments start negotiating the terms of German reunification. A crucial part of these negotiations involves talking with Russian leaders, because East Germany wants to detach itself from the Soviet Union .
Here, Angela Merkel gets to play a big role. Because she is fluent in Russian. She actually won a nationwide Russian competition in high school. So increasingly, Angela inserts herself into the negotiations with Russia. Another example of taking a small advantage she had, and using that to increase her scope and power.
At one point, the government wants to know how the average Russian feels about German reunification. So Angela just walks out onto the street and starts asking random Russians how they feel about it.
Then once the two Germanies unify, Merkel continues her rapid climb up the political ladder. She continues this pattern of being highly networked, giving people the sense that she will be useful to them, but not threaten them. I think a lot of women and minorities feel self-conscious about playing the race card or playing the gender card, and want to “earn” their positions by merit alone, but Angela never falls into this mindset — she fully leans into the unique checkboxes that she can fill: being a woman, being from the East — which is an advantage in that the new unified government wants to have enough East German representation, being a scientist and thinking very rationally... she decides to just milk this for all she can.
Her first opportunity comes when one of the members of the chancellor’s cabinet decides that he wants her as an ally. He is East German and wants more Easterners in government. He informally interviews Merkel, during which Merkel shrewdly presents herself as unthreatening but competent, and plays up their shared East German background, and successfully convinces him that she would be a good ally to him in Parliament. So he sets her up to get elected to the German parliament in the federal election of 1990. The way he does this is: There’s one district that’s a CDU party stronghold and will vote for whichever CDU candidate is running, so this guy gets Merkel on the ballot for this district, and she’s voted into Parliament.
Which is crazy given that literally a year ago, she was just a random research scientist living behind the Berlin Wall. What’s even crazier is that she managed to do all this political climbing on top of transitioning into life in a democratic capitalist country. Which - is a shocking and difficult transition for many East Germans. Like, whoa, everyone’s wearing these different clothes, the trains run so fast, the west germans look down on you for being poor and brainwashed!
Anyway, on top of all this, what’s even crazier is - Soon after she’s elected, she asked a colleague for an intro to Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Which was perfect, because Kohl was on the lookout for someone to improve the male dominated public image of his government. So after vetting her for a bit, Kohl decided to offer her a position in his cabinet, as the minister for women and family affairs. So that same year, 1990, Angela Merkel joins the cabinet as a federal minister.
At this point, she has no experience in government, and she’s also not very interested in women’s issues, but she immediately accepted the position. She recalled: “i didn’t have time to meditate over matters like my lack of expertise... what was clear to me was that there was a constellation of factors that favored me- being a woman being from the east and being young… for me this challenge was a great opportunity. i could to learn the game and the mechanisms of power, and i could do so without too many dangers”
A few years later, she’s promoted to minister of the environment.
Her time in the cabinet was a great growing experience for her. First, she really figured out and grew into her persona as a politician. She’s never been really into fashion and dressing up - to be fair, in the communist economy of East Germany, everyone kinda wore the same thing anyway - but she figured out a wardrobe and hairstyle that worked for her. She also figured out a sort of speaking style that worked for her, where she places her hands together in a sort of diamond shape when she speaks - this has become so iconic actually that it’s known as the “Merkel diamond”.
She also toughened up emotionally. One time at a cabinet meeting, the chancellor seemed to be picking on her for some reason and grilling her with questions. And you know, since her childhood, Angela's motto had been to always be over prepared, never show incompetence - but in this meeting, somehow she didn’t have the answers to the questions that the chancellor threw at her, and she started crying in front of all her male colleagues. She was mortified and became more stoic and put-together in front of other officials.
She also shows a remarkable amount of savvy in building her team of staffers. Controversially, she fires very competent people who worked for her predecessors and replaces them with people who she knew would be loyal to her. This is, again, a move that many powerful people in history have been known to do. Making sure that everyone who works for you is loyal, above all. And this worked out great for her.
With her subordinates, she had extremely high standards. They had to be candid and avoid flattery. They had to be incredibly protective of her privacy—leak any small detail about Merkel’s personal life, however inconsequential, and you’re fired. They had to be extremely precise when citing any facts or figures. When asked if he enjoyed working with Merkel for two decades, one aide replied with a vehement NO! - every minute was challenging. Though she never labeled herself a feminist, her inner circle consisted of two women, who were incredibly in sync with her—they’d use hand gestures to tell her to “speed up” or “smile a little” while she spoke, they’d be reading the same books at the same time as her without meaning to, and they served her for almost 30 years.
Meanwhile, Chancellor Kohl started to like Merkel more and more, and became a very involved mentor figure to her. He’s one of those guys who loves to be really loud, domineering, and arrogant - he thinks he’s gonna go down in history as the great chancellor Kohl who reunified east and west germany - so he like, yes, he mentors her and gives her a lot of opportunities, but at the same time he patronizes and belittles her - he frequently parades her around and refers to her in public as “mein Madchen,” which means “my little girl” — people observed that he seemed to view Merkel as a kind of trophy of German reunification. And she puts up with it, she lets him believe that she’s just a trophy figure who won’t threaten his leadership, and milks it to keep gaining more power.
Until the day that Chancellor Kohl gets into a big scandal - turns out he was evading taxes and soliciting illegal political donations for the CDU, their political party. And this is a huge blow to the CDU - their popularity nosedives, it looks like the party might be screwed in upcoming elections. At this point Angela Merkel is the Secretary General of the CDU, so her role is supposed to be to smooth over this scandal and try to rescue the party’s public image. Instead, she does the very opposite, in an explosive move that ends up catapulting her career forward.
What she does is - she writes an op-ed in a leading German newspaper that denounces Chancellor Kohl with surgical and deadly precision, and says directly that the CDU needs to get rid of Kohl and stand on its own two feet independent of him. Now this is a big deal because Kohl has been chancellor for 16 years and is basically the face of the CDU. Furthermore, the unspoken rule in politics has always been that if you’re trying to stage a coup and get rid of someone in power, you don’t just go off and announce that to the whole world - you try to maneuver subtly. So because Merkel’s op-ed was so shocking and so direct, it caused a huge stir in the entire country. Now Kohl thinks Merkel is his little girl - he just doesn’t believe that she was capable of writing this op-ed all on her own - so instead of blaming her, he convinces himself that his second-in-command was actually responsible for the op-ed, and basically destroys that guy politically too. So now the two most powerful men in the country have basically been wiped out, and Merkel moves into position to take over.
However, she has a rival named Merz, who’s quite powerful. For a while it looks like it’ll be either Merz or Merkel for chancellor. But then the conservative wing of the party starts to plot against Merkel—they want to prevent Merkel from running, and instead back another guy named Stoiber. So Merkel sees that her opportunity is slipping away, and she decides to sacrifice her chance at becoming chancellor this year, in order to gain power over Merz, and make a stronger run next time. So she calls up Stoiber and says, hey, I’ll publicly endorse you for the chancellorship, if you make me the parliamentary leader instead of Merz. Stoiber says, ok, deal. And so, a few weeks later, Merkel becomes parliamentary leader AND party leader of the CDU. Merz is absolutely appalled by this, and he ends up actually leaving politics entirely because he realizes he can’t outsmart Merkel.
On her first day as CDU leader, Merkel strode into a conference room where the other CDU officials awaited. Looking around the room, she asked everyone to get up and disperse randomly around the table. As a biographer comments, “Her message was clear: Don’t bother plotting against me. I’m watching you. This was Angela Merkel’s party now.”
Over the next 5 or so years, she keeps growing her power and popularity within the party, and in 2005 she becomes Chancellor.
High-Integrity Leadership Style
It’s inspiring to see how far Merkel got without being charismatic, at least not in front of crowds. She is very charming in 1:1 settings - and she charms you in large part by being a great listener and interesting conversationist - but in front of crowds, she is really bad at stirring people’s emotions, at talking big... she just says things as they are, plain and simple.
It’s also inspiring to see that she’s able to remain chancellor for 16 years without a single personal scandal. She’s known for her high integrity, and she remains modest and humble, doing her own grocery shopping and living in a really low-key apartment, throughout her entire time in power.
And everyone she’s close to—her family, her new husband—also mirrors her in valuing duty and independence of thought over simple blind loyalty. We already know her parents moved to East Germany in order to do their duty to God. Her parents also never voted for her, because they disagreed with her party’s politics. And her second and current husband, Joachim Sauer, is the same way. Unlike most political spouses, Sauer only ever appears in public with Merkel once a year, to attend an annual opera festival. He strictly refuses to answer any press questions about anything that doesn’t pertain to his own chemistry research. One time the Obamas invited Merkel and Sauer to dinner after awarding Merkel the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and Sauer said no, because he was having dinner with his colleague that night. There’s probably a reason Merkel’s been married to this guy for 30 years and counting - like her and her parents, he clearly values his own independent career and his obligations to his colleagues over sharing in his wife’s public clout, even though in private, there are strong signs that he supports and serves as a shrewd political advisor to her.
I will say though that I’m not sure if her high-integrity approach would’ve worked outside of postwar Germany. There’s a stereotype that, at a baseline, Germans are cold, unemotional, and prefer for their public servants to be intellectuals rather than businessmen. Insofar as that’s true, Merkel fits in very well with this culture.
But on top of that, they were scarred by their experience with Hitler, who came to power by making eloquent speeches that roused the masses. I read a memoir recently by a woman who grew up in Germany in the 80s and 90s. She pulls up an old high school homework assignment, where the teacher begins by saying, “he who possesses linguistic skills possesses people,” and then asks the student to analyze a hitler speech to understand the rhetorical devices hitler used to control his audience. She says, “we learned that our language was once poetic, but now potentially dangerous... we struck the german words for hero, victory, battle, and pride from our vocabularies.” So you know, as a country, they’ve been conditioned to believe that someone who speaks too eloquently is actually dangerous - Merkel herself actually intentionally kept her speeches bland, because she thought it would be actively dangerous to German democracy if she became too eloquent of a speaker. So in this context, it makes sense that the German people would uniquely appreciate Merkel’s style in a way that I don’t know if most other cultures would.
Accomplishments as Chancellor
As Chancellor, Merkel’s style was all about compromise—with both domestic and international leaders. Her male predecessors saw politics as an act of bravado and bullying others into doing things for you. Merkel saw politics as a rational game of give and take, trading favors with other people to get as much of what you want as you can. Through this approach, she ended up achieving a lot. In her first year in power, 2005, she passed a major EU agreement, amended the german constitution, earned a popularity rating of 89 percent, the highest ever recorded by a chancellor, and was nominated TIME Magazine’s person of the year.
I think her relationship with Vladimir Putin illustrates her strategy well. During their first meeting, Putin pulled a classic intimidation tactic on her - he knew that she was terrified of dogs, and so he brought his giant black dog to meet her. But Merkel stayed calm and spoke to him in fluent Russian, which earned his respect.
Then, when Russian soldiers invaded Crimea in 2014, the international community immediately tried to criticize Putin. And Putin replied, what? Those weren’t my soldiers, they were just random russian men, i didn’t tell them to go into crimea. A lot of other western leaders were like, this is so frustrating, i don’t know how to deal with this response. But Merkel knew how to punish him - she recognized that he desperately wanted to be recognized as a major player on the global stage, so to punish him, she canceled a G10 summit that was supposed to be held in Russia, which was a huge blow to his ego. And then she rallied the EU to impose economic sanctions on him.
Ideologically, her biggest goal is to ensure that WWII doesn't repeat itself, and that Germany properly atones for its sins during this time. So she hates nationalism and instead believes strongly in strengthening the EU. She has a “near-reverential belief in America,” for upholding western democracy and basically rebuilding Germany after the war. And she supports Israel, obviously because of the Holocaust.
As an example of her dedication to the EU, after the 2008 economic crisis, Greece’s economy failed and the EU bailed them out. Two years later, Greece got a second bailout. Then in 2015, Merkel found herself yet again needing to negotiate a third bailout for Greece. The negotiations were stalling because on one hand, a lot of EU countries were fed up by having to repeatedly send money to Greece; and on the other hand, Greek leaders were unwilling to accept the austerity measures that the EU was trying to impose on them in exchange for the money. So Greece was on the verge of deciding to just leave the EU, and a lot of EU leaders were in favor of it—including Germany’s finance minister, who was actively maneuvering for it to happen. Merkel let him maneuver. But that Sunday night, Merkel casually suggested to the Greek prime minister that they get together to look over the bailout proposal, without the German finance minister present. They went over the plan in excruciating detail, and the Greek finance minister recalls that Merkel used “psychological manipulation and remarkable diligence” to get him to sign off on a number of austerity measures. At 4:45am, Merkel got the Greek leader to sign off on a humiliating set of pension cuts and tax hikes, and kept the EU together.
In terms of domestic policy, pretty much all her policies involve spotting an issue, and figuring out the best and most logical solution to it. She’s not one of those really ideological politicians who’s trying to actively shape the country according to how they think it ought to look—she just deals with problems very pragmatically. The one glaring exception is her refugee policy. In 2015, Europe was facing a refugee crisis - a huge amount of Syrians were fleeing their civil war. Many EU countries were horrified and rushed to close their borders. While Germany was deciding what to do, two things happened. First, at an EU meeting, the Hungarian prime minister said, “it is only a matter of time before Germany will build a fence [to keep the refugees out]. When they have done so, then we'll have the kind of Europe I like.” Merkel seemed really triggered—she paused and replied, "I lived a long time behind a fence, it is not something I wish to do again."
The second thing that happens is that Merkel was doing a routine meet-and-greet with German residents, and a refugee girl went up to the stage and talked about how much she liked being in Germany, how she hoped to go to college here, and didn’t want to go back to her war-torn home. She asked Merkel why she couldn’t stay here, and Merkel replied, well, there are more people who want to live in Germany than we have resources for. And then the girl started crying. And Merkel just seemed so visibly moved, almost to tears herself.
Soon after that, she announced that Germany would not turn away any refugees.
This represents a transformational moment for her. Previously, everything merkel ever did was the personification of cautious, rational decision-making. Suddenly, she made an unpopular decision that seemed to come from the heart, and from the Christian values she was raised with, and she threw all of her carefully accumulated political capital behind it.
1.7 million people applied for asylum in Germany between 2015 and 2019. While some Germans were welcoming, others were concerned and skeptical. The skepticism and fear grew when there were a couple of terrorist attacks by Muslim refugees against German people.
The aftermath of her refugee policy revealed the greatest failings of her low-charisma persona. I think when most of the decisions are rational, then fine, you can explain it in a sort of monotone way and the people will be like, alright, that makes sense. But when it comes to a decision to accept a huge flood of Middle Eastern refugees—I mean, that’s something that you need to appeal to people’s hearts for, and Angela Merkel repeatedly failed to make her refugee policy resonate in the hearts of the German people. When people brought up concerns about how to integrate all the refugees, Merkel would just repeat the phrase, “We can do it.” Partly as a result of this, the right-wing nationalist party, the AfD, was able to start gaining traction and gain seats in parliament. A common criticism of Merkel is that if she was more charismatic, better at appealing to emotions, more proactive in listening to the feelings of right-wing Germans, the AfD wouldn’t be as much of a threat as they’ve now become.
Conclusion
Ok, to sum it all up - we learned about Angela Merkel’s early life in East Germany, where she showed early signs of discipline, intelligence, and a knack for talking to people. Interestingly, one thing she has in common with Anna Wintour from the previous episode is that both had stern fathers with high standards, and both were highly perfectionistic and self-controlled as children. We talked about the rapid changes the country went through once the Berlin Wall fell, and the opportunities it created for Merkel to rise quickly in politics. We learned about how she was extremely strategic in seizing these opportunities: convincing powerful people that she’d be a competent and unthreatening ally, using her identity as a woman to her advantage in willingly being the “token woman” and letting them underestimate her, and then making strong surprise moves to gain power — all without compromising on her integrity and straightforwardness. We explored her legacy as an effective diplomat, and as the chancellor who welcomed refugees to Germany with open arms.
Sources:
- The Chancellor: The Remarkable Odyssey of Angela Merkel by Kati Marton
- Angela Merkel: Europe's Most Influential Leader by Matthew Qvortrup
- Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home by Nora Krug