Merkel’s small shoe-size too large for her anointed heir
Berlin, Wednesday
Angela Merkel’s shoe-size is 38, she revealed to a rain-sodden, momentarily confused audience at an election rally on the Baltic coast on Tuesday night.
That is relatively small – 5.5 in UK sizes - which means her shoes should not be too hard to fill. “That’s manageable,” Merkel said.
As the German chancellor chuckled mischievously, she gestured towards the man on her left, a 33-year-old tax auditor who is running to inherit the north-eastern constituency she has held since it was created in 1990.
But her comment also applied to the man on her right, Armin Laschet, who is meant to lead the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) into the post-Merkel era as her designated continuity candidate at Sunday’s national election.
Laschet, 60, is struggling to live up to his brief, with the CDU scrambling in polls behind the resurgent Social Democratic party (SPD) of the finance minister, Olaf Scholz.
For the behemoth of postwar German politics to slump to second place after 16 years in power, possibly on no more than about 20% of the vote, would amount to nothing less than a political earthquake.
Tuesday’s rally in Stralsund was meant to be one of the last opportunities to turn the tide for Laschet’s campaign and send Merkel’s many admirers across the country into the voting booths full of enthusiasm for her chosen successor.
The mood music on the night was anything but promising. An ash grey sky brought gusts of wind and rain to Stralsund’s Alter Markt town square just as Merkel and entourage took to the stage.
A small but noisy crowd of fewer than 50 anti-lockdown protesters chanting “Merkel muss weg” (“Merkel must go”) threatened to drown out the politicians’ speeches.
But the chancellor gave it her best. Laschet, she said, would fight to bring jobs into the structurally weak region in the formerly socialist east with the same dedication she had shown, while a leftwing coalition led by Scholz would “only think about how to distribute wealth, not generate it”.
Merkel warned that a left-leaning German government would run up joint debts with the rest of Europe not just temporarily, through the EU’s pandemic recovery package, but permanently, “which would not be good for Europe and become a great burden in a few years’ time”.
Still, fiery rhetoric has never been Merkel’s forte, and the line about her shoe size was the most memorable.
In a typical Merkellian twist, she opted to express her support not by talking up the feats of a future chancellor Laschet, but by talking down her own.
The line of succession to Merkel’s tenure has been the source of speculation since her second term in office, when names whispered in Berlin’s corridors of power were the since-disgraced Bavarian defence minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, and Ursula von der Leyen, now the president of the European Commission. - Agencies
