Canadian Journalist Michael Petrou’s Portrait of German Chancellor Angela Merkel — Demonstrates Why I Respect Her More than any Other Leaders

© 2015 Peter Free

 

24 February 2015

 

 

There is finally a competent adult rising through the ranks of narcissistic pretenders

 

Not surprisingly, she is a woman:

 

 

[Angela Merkel] holds power lightly, says a senior official close to her, because she understands that the rest of Europe will accept her command only if she continually involves her partners.

 

“She’s the only person [Russian President] Vladimir Putin takes really seriously. It’s not [U.S. President Barack] Obama. It’s no one else from the European Union. It’s Merkel who really matters to him as a powerful person in this conflict,” says Stefan Meister, an Eastern Europe expert at the German Council on Foreign Relations . . . .

 

Mariam Lau, a political correspondent at the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit [says:]

 

“She is governed by reason, and around her she sees especially male helplessness. [Obama’s] call to arms is a sign of helplessness, because America feels its former power slipping away. The same goes for Putin. All he has is military might. He has no economic strength. His country is falling apart. But what he does have is military power, and that’s what he wants to use.”

 

Merkel was never hungry for the trappings of power: the wealth, the prestige and the deference.

 

She doesn’t need adoration. She lives modestly and doesn’t look down on her colleagues in Europe, nor fellow citizens in Germany.

 

And yet—and in part because of those qualities—she’s emerged as the one figure uniquely suited to deal with two of the biggest crises facing the West today.

 

“The main reason for her popularity is that people feel safe with her,” says Ralph Bollmann . . . author of the recent Merkel biography, The German: Angela Merkel and Us.

 

In Merkel, Germans see traits they want to believe are their own: thrift, modesty, rationality, a willingness to work hard.

 

“Her modesty is the condition on which Germans and everyone else accept this leadership. It’s precisely because she doesn’t want to lead that German leadership is conceivable,” says Lau.

 

© 2015 Michael Petrou, Angela Merkel: The Real Leader of the Free World, MacLean’s (20 February 2015) (extracts)

 

As an American in Germany, I see Chancellor Merkel in the same light. She incorruptibly engages common sense. Those qualities set her apart.

 

 

 

The moral? — Testosterone, avarice and narcissism make us violently stupider than we already are

 

Chancellor Merkel, the antithesis of these, is arguably the only grownup on the world stage.