Germany's Queen Mum: Nostalgia for the Merkel Era Alive and Well
SOURCE:Spiegel International
With every blunder from Chancellor Friedrich Merz, longing for the purported good, old days of Angela Merkel grows in Germany. Many miss her tone, her presence. Has Germany's Queen Mum noticed?
It is a small, intimate gathering that Norbert Lammert has invited to the Deutsche Parlamentarische Gesellschaft – a non-partisan organization of German lawmakers at all levels – in Berlin on this Thursday in October. The chairman of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, Lammert is hosting a dinner for former Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel, who turned 80 in June. And Schüssel was able to invite whoever he wanted.
His longtime skiing buddy and former ambassador Wolfgang Ischinger is present, as is Hermann Gröhe, the former general secretary of the Christian Democratic Union in addition to being the ex-health minister and potentially the next president of the German Red Cross. Economy Minister Katherina Reiche also makes an appearance, even though she doesn’t have much time and has to leave early.
The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 45/2025 (November 7th, 2025) of DER SPIEGEL.
But what makes this evening a special one is the second guest of honor. It’s Angela Merkel. The former chancellor was in a fantastic mood, participants will later report.
Merkel seems back to her old self. At the end of her 16-year tenure in the Chancellery in December 2021, she seemed exhausted – tired and sapped of energy. None of that, though, is apparent on this particular evening. Quick witted, with dry humor and, as the hours pass, full of anecdotes. The conversation moves quickly and rapidly changes direction, as it often does when old friends meet up for dinner. The state of the world, China, Trump, Putin – it’s usually Schüssel who steers the chitchat.
A few days earlier, the Swedish Academy of Sciences had awarded the Nobel prize in chemistry to three researchers from Japan, Australia and the U.S. for their "new form of molecular architecture.” It’s really fascinating, says Schüssel – and Merkel, the physicist, begins holding forth.
She knows the researchers, she says, and is even friends with one of them. She then launches into a detailed explanation of the "metal-organic frameworks” that the three Nobel winners were working on. The group listens attentively. Merkel was able to explain the complex material so clearly and accessibly, a participant would later say, that even he was able to understand. It was clear, the participant said, just how deep her understanding was of the research results.
The most surprising thing about the evening is what they don’t talk about: the current condition of Germany’s governing coalition and the chancellor. There isn’t a word spoken about Friedrich Merz. Schüssel doesn’t broach the subject and neither does Merkel. Their interests lie elsewhere. The current chancellor, it would seem, doesn’t play a huge role in their thoughts. Instead, the group would disband with a different sort of memory from that evening – of just how relaxed and at ease the former chancellor was. She was, by all accounts, a woman at peace with herself and with the world.
Merkel, though, inhabits two different worlds these days, and they couldn’t be more different. It’s like a split screen on which two completely different films are playing. Merkel is in the first of those worlds when she is doing things like opening the new oceanographic museum on the Baltic Sea island of Stralsund, with hundreds of people waiting on the streets in awe as if she were the German Queen Mum.
This is the world of her book tour, during which every reading has sold out after just a few hours and long lines winding through the streets when Merkel turns up to sign her memoirs "Freedom.” It is the world where her fans are able to exchange a few words with her in the bookshop, later looking as though they had just seen an apparition. In this world, Merkel is carried along on a wave of nostalgia and affection.
Here, Merkel stands for all that many people believe her successor Merz is lacking. The moderate tone, the reasonableness, the trustworthiness, empathy – qualities that unite. Whereas Merz polarizes, divides and excludes, Merkel embodies the opposite. It is her tone that many people have begun to miss, not necessarily her policies. With every coalition crisis and every verbal gaffe produced by the current chancellor, a wistful yearning grows for the purportedly good old Merkel era. Even among her political opponents.
"The way she smiles is so cute,” writes "kaixtor” beneath a video showing her walking down a street. And "Kano_ne” comments: "I want to embrace this woman just once in my life.” Döner photos of Merkel are posted online, where they collect clicks and likes. Merkel memes go viral, and Merkel döner videos on TikTok have become cult.
Chancellor Merkel trying her hand at making a döner in 2008.
Foto: Hakki Akduman / dpa / picture alliance
Then there is the other world, in which Merkel provokes a backlash more severe than almost any other German politician. The world where an argument erupts as soon as she says even a single word. Where every public statement she makes is examined under a microscope to determine if there might be a tiny grain of criticism of the current chancellor. It is well known, after all, that Merkel and Merz are bound by decades of deep distaste for one another. That grain of criticism is almost always found.
May a former chancellor even do such a thing? they ask in exasperation. Is it really okay for her to become publicly involved four years after leaving the Chancellery and proffer advice to her successor’s successor? Advice that is frequently understood less as wise counsel and more as jabs? Why doesn’t this woman just keep her trap shut, particularly given that during the 16 years she spent in office, she produced many of the problems that Merz must now grapple with?
It is a world where eyes roll in annoyance whenever Merkel says anything at all, such as during Christian Democratic Union executive board meetings, for example. A world where people cannot understand why such an intelligent and complex personality as the former chancellor seems unable to utter even a whisper of self-criticism. A world of fierce resistance, where she is met with contempt, hatred and violent fantasies, particularly online.
How does Merkel see these two worlds? How does she see the fact that, while she has a lot of fans, she also has a lot of enemies who blame her for the country’s current difficulties? When asked recently during a live-audience interview in Berlin hosted by DER SPIEGEL whether she is aware that she is so polarizing, Merkel responded: "To a certain extent, it is the nature of things.”
Times are extremely difficult, she said. If you’ve been German chancellor for 16 years, she said, people take a close look at what you did during those 16 years. "That’s why it doesn’t surprise me.” On the other hand, she said: "The idea that once you have found the guilty party, the future will automatically be better – that isn’t right either. And so, I could say – you’ll again accuse me of flippancy – but I could say: If it helps, then it was my fault. But that isn’t an adequate description of the situation either.”
Merkel hasn’t said much more than that recently about herself and her legacy. Which makes it unclear what role she would like to play in the future as a former chancellor. She also hasn’t said much about what goals she may have set for herself. For this story, however, more than two dozen contemporaries, confidants, friends and political opponents spoke with DER SPIEGEL about Merkel – on condition that they not be identified so that they could speak freely.
Together, they paint a picture of a woman who primarily has herself in mind when she makes public comments. Her public image, her political legacy, her historical role – and little else. A woman who, even in small, intimate gatherings, allows for little doubt that she was mostly – no, almost always – right. That her policies were, as she so often said while chancellor: without alternative.
It's a Monday evening in October and the Bonn Opera House is sold out. The most expensive tickets cost almost 50 euros, but they were all snapped up just a few hours after presale began. There is plenty of gray hair in the seats, but a number of younger people have also come. Students, and a handful of schoolchildren. An affluent, well-educated audience, from the looks of it, as many men as women, a couple of headscarves.
"People come who pick up a vegan sandwich at the train station on their way and have no patience for politicians like (Bavarian Governor Markus) Söder or Merz,” says a prominent CDU member who believes the current chancellor’s performance has been nothing short of a catastrophe. "These are people who want an emotional and empathetic approach from politicians and not fighting and war and severity.” People, he says, who Merz has lost: "the women, the young people and” – at least since Merz’s racially loaded comments recently about the cityscape of German metropolises, he says – "also the migrants.”
A number of discussions on this evening seem to center on that controversial statement from Merz: "But we of course still have this problem when it comes to how our cityscapes,” he said. Will Merkel say something about it? Will she criticize the current chancellor?
And then, here she is. She sits down at her black table in front of the dark blue velvet curtain, all alone in the spotlight on this large stage, a glass of water before her. And immediately, it’s as if she never left. "You know me,” Merkel once said during an election campaign. And yes, everyone knows her. The blazer (light blue on this evening), the brusque, north-eastern German tone, the facial expressions, the hand gestures, the dry wit. Was she ever gone?
Readings with Merkel are exactly that. She doesn’t need a moderator to ask her questions. She has her book, sitting before her on the table with a few tabs between the pages and a handful of notecards next to it. She glances at her notes, flips to the correct page in the book, pulls out the tab, reads, puts the tab back where it was, makes a brief transition, and then reads the next passage marked in the book.
Angela Merkel at a reading in March in Erfurt.
Foto: Sascha Fromm / IMAGO
That’s it, the grand Merkel show. No frills. No extras. Instead, as the influential daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung will later describe it, "understated cues with which Merkel signals to the audience that she is dealing with adults.” The patrons love it. They giggle at her self-ironic transitions, clap every now and then, hang on her every word. There are no disruptions, no yells from the crowd, no homemade protest posters. A home game for the former chancellor.
Of course she addresses her migrant policies as well on this evening. For Merkel, the refugee summer of 2015 was the defining event of her tenure. Her decision on the night of September 4 to allow the refugees to enter Germany divided her time in office into a before and after, she says. None of her decisions were as controversial as that one. She wants to justify herself – and it becomes the longest passage she will read on this evening.
Even the word "influx” bothered her, she reads. "I had entered politics in 1990 because people interested me. People, not influxes or anonymous masses.” Particularly when it comes to refugee policy, it is important to act "honestly on the merits and moderate in tone.” The audience is silent. Is this the moment. Is Merkel about to take Merz to task for his comments?
"The vast majority of people have an unerring sense for whether the actions of politicians are purely calculated, whether they may even be being led around by the AfD – or whether they are acting because they are genuinely interested in solving problems,” she reads from her book. For democratic parties, "restraint and balance” are the foundations and preconditions for success.
It is a passage she has read on many previous occasions. Indeed, she has pulled it out at every one of her readings over the past several months. But this time around – indeed, on that same evening – the German tabloid Bild writes: "Merkel Rebukes Merz for 'Cityscape’ Statement.” In Berlin, they roll their eyes. Why can’t she just keep her trap shut? "Does she have to do such things?” grumbles a prominent member of the CDU. "Does she really have to attack the chancellor yet again?”
He then admits that he only read the headline, but that’s how democracy-by-outrage works in Berlin. In truth, Merkel doesn’t devote even a single word to the cityscape debate, or even the chancellor himself, during her appearance in Bonn. She speaks about the past, justifies herself, tries to put her historic role in the correct light. Her focus is on herself, not on Merz.
And still, the impression that she is distancing herself from her successor isn’t wrong. In the audience, after all, many people interpret the passages Merkel reads from her book exactly as Bild does. As criticism of the current chancellor – a criticism of which they approve. Because Merz intentionally initiated an 180-degree reversal of Merkel’s refugee policies and repeatedly said in public that this is precisely his plan: to do things differently than Merkel. More than anything, though, he has adopted a harsher tone – and that is something that many CDU supporters also find concerning.
As such, Merkel is facing a dilemma. She shaped Germany for 16 years. Her decisions continue to have ramifications to the present day. The reforms that were never implemented, her policy toward Russia, the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, her refugee policies. If she defends the decisions she made back then, she is automatically contradicting Merz. She accepts that it will cause a stir. And she doesn’t seem to particularly care.
Her reading in Bonn comes to an end after an hour and a half. When Merkel stands, so too does her audience. A standing ovation for the ex-chancellor. For a woman who many believe has just put the chancellor in his place. Even though she didn’t mention him with even a single word.
When Helmut Kohl was voted out of office in 1998 after 16 years in the Chancellery, he simply continued on as before. He would regularly call Romano Prodi in Brussels to tell the European Commission president what he should do. He received powerful regional CDU leaders in his office, phoned around, engaged in intrigue and fired barbs at Wolfgang Schäuble, his successor as head of the CDU.
At party conventions, he would hold court as he always had, and things likely would have come to a head with Schäuble at some point had the party donation scandal not sent Kohl to the political sidelines one year later. But he still wasn’t interested in staying quiet. It is said that even as late as 2011, Kohl told confidants that the course being pursued by the CDU Chancellor Merkel was "extremely dangerous.” ("She’s going to ruin my Europe.”)
It is generally accepted as good manners that predecessors in the Chancellery do not publicly criticize their successors, particularly not if they are members of the same party. But hardly a single ex-chancellor has adhered to that imperative. The war that Konrad Adenauer waged against his successor and former economy minister, Ludwig Erhard, ("Erhard isn’t up to the job”) went down in the history books. The Social Democrat Helmut Schmidt even became something of a cult figure for continually bombarding a stream of successors with public advice from the sidelines over the course of three decades.
And now Merkel. Her confidants are fond of pointing out that she is the first chancellor in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany who wasn’t voted out of office and didn’t have to resign, but left office of her own free will. Those who take such a step, they say, are no longer interested in being actively involved in politics.
Angela Merkel with ex-Chancellor Helmut Kohl and CDU Chairman Wolfgang Schäuble at a press conference in 1999.
Foto: Melde Press / SZ Photo / picture alliance
That is consistent with statements made by Merkel herself during the dinner for Wolfgang Schüssel. Participants say that she clearly explained why she stepped down from the board of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. After three decades in politics, she said, she was simply no longer interested in the tedious committee work. She simply ignored the uproar in the party over her withdrawal, which many saw as a move to distance herself from the CDU.
Merkel, say people in her orbit, is enjoying her newfound freedom. Now that she has finally completed the strenuous work on her memoirs, they say, she can finally relax for the first time since leaving office. Indeed, she was even seen regularly at her favorite lake in the Uckermark region over the summer.
One day, she approached a young student at the lake who was sunning herself on the dock and reading Bernhard Schlink’s book "The Reader.” Merkel, who had just finished a swim, was interested, and there she was standing in the water in her wet bathing suit and chatting with the student about the book, her bodyguard floating on a paddleboard a few meters away.
"A new era is beginning for me,” Merkel said in a 2021 interview she gave after the CDU lost the election. "When I say myself that a different era, a new era, is beginning,” says a Merkel confidant, "then I also know that it isn’t my era. And she is fine with that.”
Governing was Merkel’s life, never the party. She may still have contacts inside the party and receives parliamentarians if they ask for an appointment, but in contrast to Kohl or Adenauer, she does not cultivate old networks to damage her successor. If you can believe people in her orbit, she speaks surprisingly little about the chancellor. Merz, they say, is simply not someone she pays much attention to.
Her own image is more important to her, and that necessarily means that she primarily looks to the past. There are influential Merkel supporters in the CDU who find that bothersome. "Merkel was always far more mature than many men in politics,” says an important party member, "because she was far less concerned about all the vanities.” But now? Now, just like the men, everything seems to be focused on herself.
Merkel could comment on important issues like the future of democracy, but were she to do so, she would also have to be critical of her own share in problems Germany has been struggling to overcome. The addiction to Russian natural gas. The huge military spending cuts. The country’s eroding infrastructure. All the things she left to her successors. "The question must be asked: How could things have got this far?” says the senior CDU member, who has always been well-disposed toward her.
On the afternoon before Merkel’s appearance in the Bonn Opera House, the ex-chancellor spends an hour as the guest of Philipp Seehausen. The bookseller runs a shop in Tannenbusch, a district of which many in Bonn are wary. It has a large number of migrants, drug problems, crime, high unemployment and, for Bonn, a lot of AfD voters. Apartments will sometimes go up in flames, and there is even gunfire on occasion. Nevertheless, prosperous professionals have begun spending good money on homes in Tannenbusch.
On this afternoon, an endless line stretches away from Seehausen’s bookshop. Merkel is signing her memoirs, and more than 400 people have shown up. It’s raining, but everyone seems to be in a good mood. The dentist is waiting next to the real estate agent, the real estate agent is standing next to the Kurdish barber, and next to the Kurdish barber is a welfare recipient who has donned a freshly ironed shirt for the occasion.
A baker and his assistant from Syria are distributing small bread rolls, while the supermarket around the corner is providing hot tea. Everyone is excited to meet the former chancellor. And Seehausen, who has long been involved in improving the fortunes of his neighborhood, "is proud of the cityscape” on display this afternoon in Tannenbusch.
Since it became known that Merkel would be coming to his bookshop, says Seehausen, he can divide the reactions into three categories. The first say that while they may never have voted for Merkel, they find it quite cool that the ex-chancellor is coming to visit them in Tannenbusch.
Merkel signing books in Seehausen's bookshop in the Tannenbusch neighborhood of Bonn.
Foto: Herand Müller-Scholtes
Then there are those who claim to never have voted for her but say they miss her style of politics. And finally, the last group, which blames Merkel for all the suffering in the world at large and, specifically, in Tannenbusch. The ones who say they feel sick whenever they even see a photo of Merkel. That includes the man who is wondering whether he should get his book autographed so he can immediately throw it in the trash.
Seehausen is standing in the shop, watching as people stand nervously in front of Merkel’s table, exchange a few words with her, take a selfie and then leave with a smile on their faces. "It was as if the people are coming out of the movie theater after watching a wonderful film,” he says. "'Oh,’ they say, 'that was great. What a wonderful encounter.’”
The bookseller is able to witness firsthand on this afternoon how people are increasingly seeing in Merkel only what they want to see. Even those who never voted for her now feel that she didn’t do such a bad job over those 16 years in office. That she somehow managed to keep things going. The further her tenure fades into the past, the more her image is disconnecting from her actual political accomplishments. Even among her political opponents.
At Merkel’s reading in Ulm, for example, none other than Hilde Mattheis is standing in line, waiting to get her copy of Merkel’s memoirs signed. As a hard-core leftist, the long-time SPD parliamentarian was even controversial within her own party. Now, in retirement, she is waiting patiently for her turn with the book under her arm. "We really did have quite a good time with her,” she says.
And Merz? A member of the last Merkel government, on the way to the Bundestag, still clearly recalls being unexpectedly barked at last year by Merz, who was CDU floor leader at the time. "What a pile of garbage you’ve left me that I now have to clean up,” Merz said. It was a brief outburst, and then Merz strode away without saying goodbye.
That was the reputation that followed Merz. For many years, the mere mention of Merkel’s name was enough to send his blood pressure through the roof. The fact that Merkel coolly pushed him out of the fraction leader position in 2002 is something for which Merz never forgave her. But now, he is in the position he always wanted, German chancellor. He now has other concerns, and is perhaps beginning to realize what it takes to stay in office for 16 years like Merkel did.
Photos of former conservative floor leaders hanging outside the group meeting room in the Bundestag.
Foto: Jens Gyarmaty / laif
If you believe people close to him, Merz now reacts more calmly to Merkel’s interjections. He may be annoyed on occasion, but he doesn’t let it show. Merkel is no longer a threat. He has either pushed her people out of their positions or they have left on their own.
Pressure from the Merkel wing is no longer a thing – indeed, such a wing hardly exists any longer. A couple of old holdovers, including parliamentarian Roderich Kiesewetter and Merkel’s former general secretary, Ruprecht Polenz, recently joined forces in a new alliance called "Compass Mitte” because they are not convinced by the course Merz is currently charting.
They say that the social and liberal wings of the CDU are being ignored under Merz, and the point out how Merkel was able to generate far greater support. "We cannot be satisfied with the 28.6 percent from the last elections,” the group’s founding manifesto reads. The C in the party’s name is an obligation, it says right at the beginning of the three-page document: "For our treatment of our political opponents, for our political rhetoric and for the way in which we conduct internal party debates.”
It is a group that might annoy Merz, real danger only comes from the current disagreements with his own wing. The "Merz Ultras,” as they are called – the conservative lawmakers who were swept into the Bundestag on his coattails. And who are now turning away from their erstwhile idol in disgust because he has, in their eyes, become too centrist in his coalition with the Social Democrats. "There are still no answers on the large issue of social welfare reform, the pressing questions of demographic change. Something has to happen,” demands Johannes Winkel, head of the Junge Union, the CDU’s youth wing, in a conversation with DER SPIEGEL.
"We are still the only ones who are still firmly behind him, despite all of the criticism of him,” says a prominent Merkel ally. The situation is like this, he says: When the conservatives flopped in the past, the SPD would head up the next government. And when they fail, it was the conservatives. But now, the situation is different, he says: "If Merz and Klingbeil don’t find success, the enemies of democracy will take over. That is why we support Merz, no matter what.”
The same applies to Merkel. During the DER SPIEGEL live-audience interview in Berlin, she praised the chancellor. "As a citizen, I think that what Merz has done is good,” she said. "It’s a relief, honestly, that Germany is once again making its presence felt in the world with charm and conviction.” Praise for Merz? It was so unusual that it was sent out on the news wires.
Two days after her appearance at the Bonn Opera House, two armored sedans drive up to Il Punto at midday in the center of Berlin. The Italian restaurant is well known as a place where politicians meet in the capital. Helmut Kohl used to eat here, but now it is mostly lobbyists buying lunch for parliamentarians. Black-and-white photos by the late Konrad R. Müller, the legendary photographer of chancellors.
As the two black cars roll to a stop, bodyguards jump out and open the back doors. Two women get out and disappear into the restaurant so quickly that they can hardly be recognized out on the street. Angela Merkel and Beate Baumann, her closest confidant and long-time staffer. The two wrote Merkel’s autobiography together – a bestseller that has sold more than 700,000 copies in the German-speaking world.
A Merkel book signing in Stralsund.
Foto: Stefan Sauer / dpa / picture alliance
At exactly 2:30 p.m., precisely an hour and a half later, they leave the restaurant. Directly across the street is the office of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Armed Forces. Usually, a few soldiers can be seen smoking outside as they wait for their appointments. On this day, it is petty officers from the Navy on the sidewalk with their cigarettes.
This time, the two women are recognized as they climb into the cars. "Oh, it’s Merkel,” one of the soldiers calls out. And the entire group turns to face them. They smile, wave and pull out their mobile phones in excitement. Wow, the former chancellor! What luck!
Merkel turns around with a friendly smile on her face and waves. Just as the Queen Mum used to do.
