It’s Auf Wiedersehen to the chancellor this weekend as Germany goes to the polls. But what has been her impact on politics across Europe and on the global stage?
The filmmaker and gay rights activist Rosa von Praunheim once confessed that he loved Angela Merkel, but hated her Christian Democratic Union party.
This sense of Merkel as a morally attractive, quasi-presidential figure above petty partisanship is widely shared within Germany and abroad: during the Donald Trump years she was lauded as the last defender of the liberal international order; Boris Johnson described her last week as a “titan” of diplomacy; and even Alexis Tsipras, the hapless leftwing Greek prime minister who was forced by Merkel into years of austerity, cannot help but admire her “sincerity”.
