As ‘Mutti’ leaves her position in Germany after sixteen years, what will it mean for the Nordics and the rest of Europe?
Chancellor Merkel in the Nordic countries
Bullerbü-Syndrom is the German love of Sweden, and their obsession with the north was covered here late last year. The German premier, Angela Merkel, was a European unifyer. Yesterday, for the first time in sixteen years, her name was absent from a German federal ballot paper. This dependable stalwart, who grew up behind the Iron Curtain in the paranoia of DDR daily life, announced her decision to step down in 2018. In the 1990s, when freedom and democratic unification was offered, Merkel used a base in Germany to bring nations large and small together. She, along with President Macron, was sometimes seen to keep the dream alive, recently advocating such plans as a European army. Merkel spent as much time with the UK and France as with the smaller countries up north. Those included the Nordic countries. She made fifteen visits to the Nordic countries, and their leaders made many to her in Berlin. She met every one of their prime ministers (they, unlike her, came and went… unable to keep control of equally changeable coalitions). And, when they’d almost all accepted defeat on further economic collaboration, together, instead, they championed solutions to immigration and climate change.
The historical links
In the 1600s, Sweden ruled areas of modern-day Germany. In the 1940s, Germany took revenge by going to war in Finland. Even today, the Nordic nations often seem Hanseatic in stature. The children of the 1950s in Norway, Sweden and Denmark often learned German in school. Undoubtedly, and perhaps unavoidably, during the Second World War, these historical ties were to Sweden’s peril. Though Bavaria is a Catholic stronghold, Denmark may be a continuation of Luther’s homeland: the Protestant heartlands that saturated the childhood of both Angela Merkel and so many Danes and Germans. A generation of Germans, Europeans and world citizens have lost a figure of continuity. And that loss will be sorely felt in the Nordics.
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