The next leader of Europe will be no one

Leaders among them Helmut Schmidt and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand  would sort out their disagreements first and then Europeanise their compromises. But for most of the past decade, one leader has presided over Europe alone: Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany. Now, as she prepares to leave office, a competition to succeed her is underway.

Leading the charge is President Emmanuel Macron of France, whose self-proclaimed attempts to give the European Union an explicitly political purpose have been frustrated so far. Then there’s Olaf Scholz, likely to be Germany’s next chancellor, who will hope to inherit Merkel’s mantle. And perhaps at the back is Prime Minister Mario Draghi of Italy, the former president of the European Central Bank credited with saving the euro.

They can save their breath. Hamstrung by the rivalry between America and China, and deeply divided internally, the European Union inhabits a world different from that of the years of Merkel’s ascendancy. In fact, her old job hasn’t really existed for a while. There is a vacuum at the heart of the bloc for a simple reason: The European Union cannot now be led. No one is going to become the new Merkel. Though she became chancellor in 2005, Merkel’s leadership was more short-lived than many realise. It wasn’t until the eurozone crisis, which began in 2010 and sent borrowing costs soaring across the bloc, that Merkel became a European powerhouse.

In the early stages of the crisis she appeared to be just one half of a double act referred to as “Merkozy” with Nicolas Sarkozy, then president of France. But Sarkozy was more ornament than decision maker. Although they both pushed for the removal from office of Italy’s prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, it was Merkel’s intervention that proved decisive. With Sarkozy’s departure in 2012, any notion of Franco-German parity vanished.

Merkel became the central player in all the big questions Europe faced. In the summer of 2012, she blessed Draghi’s announcement of an asset-purchasing program, easing the eurozone’s borrowing costs. In 2014, she pushed a divided European Union into agreeing on collective sanctions against Russia over the annexation of Crimea. And during the 2015 refugee and migrant crisis, she upended the bloc’s asylum policy with a few words to her fellow German citizens “We can do it.” (When she retreated from that judgment a few months later, she negotiated an agreement for the whole European Union with Turkey, aided by only the Dutch prime minister, whose country happened to hold the rotating EU presidency).

Macron, coming to power in 2017, made restoring parity across the Rhine the raison d’être of his presidency. But unable to dilute Merkel’s influence or persuade her to buy into his grand vision for Europe, he soon switched to disrupting the chancellor nowhere more so than when, in October 2019, he vetoed the start of EU accession negotiations for North Macedonia and Albania. The relationship between the two, never cozy, didn’t really recover.

The reality, starkly stated, is that neither the German chancellor nor the French government can lead Europe. The compromises their predecessors made with each other are no longer available. And in the absence of leadership, Europe is headed for one thing stasis.

Thompson is a professor at the University of Cambridge

The New York Times