Story“Generation Merkel” (2/5). The German Chancellor, who will leave power the day after the legislative elections of September 26, has long been in favor of the atom. But after the Fukushima disaster in 2011, she decided to close the power plants, in opposition to the positions of her political family.
A triumph. The term is not exaggerated to qualify the 41.5% obtained by the CDU-CSU on the evening of September 22, 2013. Eight points more than in 2009, six points more than in 2005: after two terms of office at the Germany’s lead, Angela Merkel takes a third with an unprecedented score. It will be his greatest victory. In 2017, she won the elections again, but with “only” 33% of the vote.
This success is first of all his. Because on September 22, 2013, the Germans voted for Merkel before voting for her party. However, she did not promise them much. But precisely that was enough for them. “Sie kennen mich” (“You know me”), she told them, eye to eye, during her televised duel against the Social Democrat Peer Steinbrück on the 1ster September. Everything was said. Why bother with a program when you are the program yourself?
Spectacular decision
In retrospect, this “Sie kennen mich” has something fascinating when you think about Angela Merkel’s most spectacular decision during her second term: the exit from civilian nuclear power. Taken in a few days after the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan in March 2011, this decision indeed showed that the Chancellor was not the one many thought they knew. Wasn’t it she who, Helmut Kohl’s young environment minister, in 1995, said: “Without nuclear energy, we will not be able to achieve our global warming targets” ? She who, leader of the opposition, had spoken of “Purely ideological decision” when Gerhard Schröder’s “red-green” coalition had agreed, in 2002, that Germany would exit civilian nuclear power by 2020 at the latest? She who, in 2010, had gone back on the objective set by her predecessor by deciding to extend the lifespan of German power stations by several years?
While Angela Merkel will step down after the legislative elections on September 26, her 2011 nuclear turnaround is not part of the legacy claimed by Armin Laschet, her successor at the head of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU ). On the contrary. “We did things in the wrong order by first deciding to get out of nuclear and then coal. In fact, we should have done the opposite ”, the Tories candidate for chancellor has repeatedly said in recent weeks. “Hurrying out of nuclear power was not rational”, he said already in 2019, explaining that this decision, having resulted in the extension of the life of coal-fired power stations, is an aberration from the point of view of the fight against global warming.
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