Germany’s conservatives voted for decisiveness after the dreary Scholz years. Instead, they got another moderator-in-chief – one very much like Angela Merkel.

On the campaign trail the promise was simple. Friedrich Merz would be everything Angela Merkel was not: decisive where she dithered, confrontational where she compromised, ideological where she triangulated. Conservative voters, exhausted by 16 years of Merkel’s anaesthetic centrism and then three more of Olaf Scholz’s leaden continuation of it, were ready to believe him. Germany had endured nearly two decades of chancellors who moderated rather than led, who treated conviction as a liability and caution as a virtue.

Merz, the sharp-tongued former BlackRock man who needed three runs at his own party chairmanship before anyone let him near the top job, was supposed to be the corrective. He was supposed to be the man who actually stood for something. It has taken him less than a year to prove that he does not. At times in which Germany faces one crisis after the next.

Merkel perfected the art of sitting problems out – absorbing crises into the bureaucratic process

Merkel perfected the art of sitting problems out – absorbing crises into the bureaucratic process

The crisis summit held at Villa Borsig a couple of weeks ago – the Foreign Ministry’s lakeside guesthouse in north Berlin – confirmed what many in Berlin........

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