The Revolution in Germany

Angela Merkel's first term as German chancellor was one of the most lackluster stretches of German politics in recent memory. Unlike past heavyweights such as Konrad Adenauer, Willy Brandt, and Helmut Kohl, as chancellor, the ultracautious, pragmatic Merkel has failed to make any sort of lasting mark on the republic. Yet at the same time, she has quietly presided over a veritable revolution in her own party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), and in doing so she has transformed German conservatism beyond recognition. This fact is something that Merkel would never advertise. But it helps explain why, despite her unimpressive record, she has remained immensely popular, with an approval rating of 61 percent—and it is the reason the Christian Democrats will most probably walk away with the election in September and deliver Merkel a second term.

To understand just how much Merkel—who only joined the party in 1990 at the age of 36—has changed the CDU, it is useful to look back a few decades to the period immediately after World War II, when the party emerged in West Germany as a mishmash of Weimar-era conservatives, politically minded Roman Catholics, nationalists of different stripes, ethnic Germans expelled from the East, and more than a few ex-Nazis hoping to improve their fortunes. The Federal Republic's first chancellor, Adenauer, was an authoritarian, Catholic Rhinelander who relied on potent anticommunism and philo-Americanism to consolidate the party as well as the young West German state. The next strong Christian Democrat to take the reins was Kohl, who presided over Germany's historic reunification and brought the party to the cusp of the 21st century.

By the time he left office in 1998, it was already clear to many Christian Democrats that their party was in dire need of an overhaul to remain relevant in a united Germany with a modern, increasingly secular populace. Attitudes toward gender, child rearing, and sexuality had changed over the postwar decades, 17 million East German citizens had joined the republic, and the CDU needed to catch up. Merkel was just the person for the job: a woman, an Easterner, and a Protestant. Though few remember it today, her rise in the party began with a patricidal bang when she pushed her mentor, Kohl, out of the party leadership for failing to come clean on a party funding scandal. In typical Merkel fashion—unspectacular but effective—the party began stripping away its past. Although Merkel almost never invokes her own gender, the party's archconservative family planks, which envisioned male breadwinners and female homemakers, were the first to come under fire. Merkel's youthful family minister, Ursula von der Leyen, a mother of seven, paved the way for women to combine family and career, not least by allowing men to take paid time off from work to raise the kids.

Merkel also broke with the heavy-handed antiforeigner rhetoric that struggling Christian Democrats would regularly trot out. She encouraged the integration of Muslims into German society and hosted a high-profile conference to promote a dialogue between Germans and Muslims. For the first time, conservatives recognized Germany as a "country of immigration" rather than just a way station for cheap foreign labor. Merkel also demoted Catholic morality on such stances as homosexuality, divorce, and abortion. For decades, the Catholic Church had enjoyed a privileged position in the old Bonn republic, where its flock outnumbered Protestants. Adenauer and Kohl were both staunch Catholics and took the Vatican line on most social issues. With unification, Protestants became the majority again, and Merkel, who grew up as a Lutheran pastor's daughter, defied the Catholic Church in a way her predecessors would never have dared. She explicitly rebuked Pope Benedict XVI—a classic old-school German conservative—for promoting a bishop linked to Holocaust denial. She also inched away from hardline stands on abortion, stem-cell research, and homosexuality. On still other issues, such as climate policy, Merkel sidled to the center to attract younger voters.

Her unpretentious style has been another stark contrast to Germany's typically high-handed male conservatives. Thanks to her, younger CDU cabinet members now look as hip as their Green counterparts—a major first. In fact, Merkel has so successfully changed the look of the CDU—a party that now thoroughly occupies the middle ground—that her rival Social Democrats have found themselves boxed out and headed for a thumping defeat. If these reforms to German conservatism stick, she will indeed have made a mark on the country by transforming the party landscape as well as Germany's political discourse.