Angela Merkel deserves the Nobel Prize for Peace

• Author: AMOTZ ASA-EL
• Published date: 01 October 2021
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

The 24-year-old physicist, whose disdain for melodrama would later become legend, said no, but instead of adding a provocative statement just said: "I can't keep secrets."

It was 1978 and the Stasi's spooks could not imagine the real secret, that they were facing a united Germany's future matriarch and a post-communist Europe's undeclared queen.

Now, as her 16-year chancellorship draws to a close, Merkel is set to be remembered as a vestige of an era of optimism that was as brave and inspiring as it was brief and naïve.

IRONICALLY, the East German revolution's poster girl was no revolutionary.

Yes, she told the Stasi no that day, but she joined no underground, made no active protest and never claimed to have braved Soviet repression the way Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, Natan Sharansky, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or Andrei Sakharov did.

Merkel was no rebel. Boring and uncharismatic, the East German lawmaker who became West German leader Helmut Kohl's briefcase holder was no firebrand or orator. She swept no audience off its feet and was no trigger-happy warrior, in any sense and on any front. She was no Margaret Thatcher.

She was also no exhibitionist. Merkel was no Willy Brandt, who fell on his knees in front of the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial, and she was no Ronald Reagan, who located his loud cry "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" at the foothills of the monstrosity that Merkel knew all too well.

Merkel was also no originator of ideas.

Unlike Otto von Bismarck, who created the modern social safety net; unlike Konrad Adenauer, who led the rise of New Germany and the emergence of the European Community and unlike Helmut Kohl, who spearheaded Germany's reunification, Merkel created little, focusing instead on the preservation of other people's legacies.

Yes, she was a great crisis manager. Faced with the Greek economic crisis, Merkel produced a deal that balanced economic prudence with European solidarity.

The result, enormous pain for the Greeks and a loss of billions for its creditors, was no idyll, but it kept the union alive, left its cracking currency intact, and consolidated Germany's position as Europe's center of gravity. At the same time, faced with the 2008 meltdown's shock she led the German economy to quick recovery at a minimal cost.

Meanwhile, faced with a newly assertive Russia's invasions of Georgia and Ukraine, Merkel led with the US a vast international effort to sanction Moscow while keeping intact Nord Stream 2, a mega-project aimed at feeding...