It’s a grim winter’s day in Berlin, and the political climate matches the weather. Everywhere Angela Merkel looks there are storm clouds, as the values she has upheld all her career come under sustained attack.
At the start of a new decade, Europe’s premier stateswoman suddenly seems to be on the wrong side of history.
Shortly, the UK will leave the EU. A volatile US president is snubbing allies and going it alone in the Middle East. Vladimir Putin is changing the Russian constitution and meddling in Libya and sub-Saharan Africa.
Trade tensions continue, threatening the open borders and globalised value chains that are the cornerstones of Germany’s prosperity.
Ms Merkel, a former physicist renowned for her imperturbable, rational manner is a politician programmed for compromise. But today she faces an uncompromising world where liberal principles have been shoved aside by the law of the jungle.
Her solution is to double down on Europe, Germany’s anchor. I see the European Union as our life insurance, she says.
Germany is far too small to exert geopolitical influence on its own, and that’s why we need to make use of all the benefits of the single market.
Speaking in the chancellery’s Small Cabinet Room, an imposing wood-panelled hall overlooking Berlin’s Tiergarten park, Ms Merkel does not come across as under pressure. She is calm, if somewhat cagey, weighing every word and seldom displaying emotion.
But the message she conveys in a rare interview is nonetheless urgent. In the twilight of her career her fourth and final term ends in 2021 Ms Merkel is determined to preserve and defend multilateralism, a concept that in the age of Trump, Brexit and a resurgent Russia has never seemed so embattled.
This is the firm conviction that guides her: the pursuit of the best win-win situations . . . when partnerships of benefit to both sides are put into practice worldwide.
She admits that this idea is coming under increasing pressure. The system of supranational institutions like the EU and United Nations were, she says, “essentially a lesson learnt from the second world war, and the preceding decades”. Now, with so few witnesses of the war still alive, the importance of that lesson is fading.
Of course President Donald Trump is right that bodies like the World Trade Organization and the UN require reform. There is no doubt whatsoever about any of that, she says. “But I do not call the world’s multilateral structure into question.”
Germany has been the great beneficiary of Nato, an enlarged EU and globalisation. Free trade has opened up vast new markets for its world-class cars, machines and chemicals.
Sheltered under the US nuclear umbrella, Germany has barely spared a thought for its own security. But the rise of “Me First” nationalism threatens to leave it economically and politically unmoored. In this sense, Europe is existential for German interests, as well as its identity.
Ms Merkel therefore wants to strengthen the EU an institution that she, perhaps more than any other living politician, has come to personify.
She steered Europe through the eurozone debt crisis, albeit somewhat tardily: she held Europe together as it imposed sanctions on Russia over the annexation of Crimea; she maintained unity in response to the trauma of Brexit.