Ep 2: Angela Merkel: How To Be Both Machiavellian And Modest

[00:00:00] In 1954, the threat of nuclear war was in the air. The US and the Soviet Union were locked in the Cold War. Their spheres of influence touched in Germany, where West Germany was a democracy, and East Germany was a totalitarian Soviet satellite state. Between 1951 and 1955,

[00:00:21] 1.5 million people led oppressive East Germany to seek a better life in West Germany. One family went the opposite direction. The Lutheran Church had put out a call for more pastors to come preach in the atheist communist state of East Germany.

[00:00:39] Horsed Kazner was one of very few pastors who heeded that call. Kazner was expecting his first KOI out of the time, but he departed for East Germany instead of sticking around for the KOI's birth. Before he married his wife, he had warned her. I love you,

[00:00:56] but my love for God will always come first. So after giving birth alone, Mrs. Kazner took her newborn in a little basket from the western city of Hamburg to go into her husband in a tiny

[00:01:08] village in East Germany. They named their baby Angela Kazner. He would later become Angela Merkel, Chancellor of a United Ceremony. Welcome to Women of Power, a podcast where we analyze the lives of powerful women and learn from their stories and strategies. Today's episode is on Angela Merkel.

[00:01:33] Forbes magazine has ranked her as the most powerful woman in the world for 14 years. Within a year of entering politics, Merkel went from being an obscure research scientist to becoming a member of both parliament and the cabinet. During her 16-year-rain as Chancellor,

[00:01:52] she served as the factor leader of the EU, and navigated it through, and navigated it through economic crises, refugee crisis, and aggressive Russia, and more. No matter what you may think of her policies, she is a powerful woman whose tactics we can all learn from.

[00:02:09] So let's continue her story. As a child, Angela was perfectiistic, disciplined, and highly achieving. I'm sure part of that was just her natural personality, but part of it was also her dad's sternness. Mr. Kazner held his children to extremely high standards, especially Angela who is the

[00:02:27] eldest, and he rarely praised or showed he was satisfied with them. And of course, part of her discipline was simply imposed by the authoritarian East Ceremony regime. So even as a child, Angela was extremely meticulous about always being overprepared, double-checking every answer and ensuring he was never

[00:02:46] wrong. From a young age, her motto was Never Show in Competence. This, plus her natural intelligence, made her the best student in her class by quite a wide margin. There's one anecdote that people

[00:02:58] love to tell about her childhood. One day in school, the teacher invited the children to dive off of a three-meter diving board, which is almost 10 feet off the ground. Angela was nine years old and

[00:03:10] she was terrified. For 45 minutes, she paced up and down the length of the diving board, contemplating her decision. All the other kids were watching and sort of laughing, but she ignored them and kept thinking. Then, she dove into the pool. This isn't early sign of two things about

[00:03:28] her character. First, she will take her time in making a decision. Furthermore, she understands herself well enough to allow herself to just take that time to think without panicking or caving to pressure from people around her. Later in life, her political opponents would

[00:03:45] criticize and laugh at her for how much she procrastinated in decision-making. But Angela consistently ignored these people. She allowed herself to have these periods of contemplation, and she usually emerges from them, with a very clearly opinionated and confident stance. Angela also displayed

[00:04:03] an early knock for understanding and getting along with people. As a kid, Angela often organized events and parties for her peers. Once she got to high school, she was aching to get to know more

[00:04:14] people and see more of the world. So she often went to East Berlin to go to museums and just talk to anyone she met on the streets. When it was time to go to college, Angela decided to study

[00:04:26] physics because even the brainwashing East German government couldn't bend the laws of physics to inform to Marxism. Outside of school, she worked as a bartender at disco parties and at one of these parties, she met her first husband or Rick Merkel. She and Orick got married in 1977 and

[00:04:44] divorced five years later, though as you have to his last name. Angela was the one who initiated the divorce. Similar to her time on the diving board, it seems she'd been unhappy and mulling over the decision for some time. But when she did finally decide on a divorce,

[00:04:59] she was very certain and also surprised Orick. When they divorced, she was 28 years old, living in East Berlin, working toward her PhD in quantum chemistry. She was squatting illegally in an empty apartment, having casual flings with various men,

[00:05:15] and traveling around Eastern Europe to different science conferences whenever she could. When her dad came to visit, he remarked, while Angela, you really haven't come very far have you. Given their religious background, it was really embarrassing to him that she got divorced

[00:05:30] and was just living this seemingly carefree life. I'm sure that must have hurt to hear that from her father. Her whole life, he had been so disciplined in high achieving, striving so hard for

[00:05:41] his approval which was so difficult to earn. And I can imagine that his disappointment must have fueled her ambition that she displayed once she entered politics seven years later, regardless at this point, her life seemed a bit stuck. Though she didn't get her PhD and a

[00:05:56] research job in East Berlin, he recognized that she wasn't talented or packing it enough to ever be at the very top of her field. And he was trapped in East Germany with no way to leave.

[00:06:08] I think this is a key point that's easy to forget. Angela was only seven years old when the Berlin Wall was built, completely obstructing fabbo to the west. Since that time, virtually every East German believed that the Berlin Wall was permanent and that they would never

[00:06:24] again see democracy or capitalism or their loved ones in West Germany. Then comes November 9, 1989. Angela is 35 years old, the Berlin Wall falls, horrors of East Germans sorm to the wall and stream into West Berlin. It's a greatly celebrated historical moment and it also plunged

[00:06:45] both Germany's into a bit of chaos, everyone's like what do we do now? Well, first East Germany compares to hold its first free election. Previously, they technically didn't have elections, but somehow by some great mystery, the Communist Party won over 90% of the vote every single

[00:07:04] election. So in 1990, for the very first time, a bunch of different political parties are campaigning earnestly and Angela Merkel decides to join one of the campaigns. She chooses a small political party called the DA, and she starts off by just volunteering to hand out flyers. At some point,

[00:07:25] the DA needed a spokesperson. Angela saw that no one else was running for this position, so she took the opportunity to run uncontested and became the spokesperson for the DA. The DA is a small party, so they joined forces with a couple of larger parties,

[00:07:42] including the CDU, the Christian Democratic Union, to form a coalition. Now, the CDU does super well in the election, so their coalition becomes the majority coalition in the new parliament. So now the parliament has been elected and the CDU basically controls it,

[00:08:00] and at this point Angela starts networking like crazy with the CDU members. She squeezes her way into a bunch of their events and parties, often without an invitation. Whenever she manages to make a friend, she asks them to introduce her to another person.

[00:08:15] And he makes a great impression on everyone who she meets. So when the CDU is picking up their leadership team, they think of Merkel. They think, okay, she's from the DA party, that's good because they need to token DA person. She's a scientist, she's focused,

[00:08:30] she's disciplined, she's a doer. So they end up making Angela Merkel the number two spokesperson for all of East Germany. Remember, she was the spokesperson for the DA, which she ran for uncontested and now she's used that stepping stone to become Vice spokesperson of the whole country.

[00:08:49] This is a pattern that you see with successful people over and over again. They was eat some small advantage that they can cling onto and then turn that into a bigger advantage. So pretty much immediately after the government is formed, the East and West German governments

[00:09:04] start negotiating the terms of German reunification. A crucial part of these negotiations involves talking with Russian leaders because East Germany wants to detack itself from the Soviet Union. And here, Angela Merkel gets to play a big role because he is fluent in Russian.

[00:09:21] She actually won a nationwide Russian competition in high school. So increasingly, Merkel inserts herself into the negotiations with Russia. Another example of taking a small advantage she had, using that to increase her scope and power. At one point, the government wanted to know

[00:09:37] how the average Russian felt about German reunification. So Angela just walks out onto the street and starts asking random Russians how they feel. Then, once the two Germany's reunified, Merkel continues her rapid climb of the political ladder. He continues this pattern of being

[00:09:54] highly networked, giving everyone the sense that she'll be highly competent and useful to them, but not threaten them, which is key. Also, I think a lot of women and minorities feel self-conscious

[00:10:07] about playing the race card or playing the gender card, and they want to earn their positions by merit alone. But Angela never falls into this mindset. She fully leans in to the unique checkboxes that she can check, being a woman, being from the East, being a scientist,

[00:10:23] being a rational thinker. He just decides to milk all of these for all that she can. Her first opportunity comes when one of the members of the Chancellor's Cabinet decides that he wants Merkel as an ally. This guy is an East-Cherman and he wants more Easterners in government.

[00:10:40] He informally interviews Merkel during which Merkel has truly presents herself as unthreatening but competent, and plays up their shared East-Cherman background. She suggests that she would be a good ally to him in Parliament. So he sets her up to get elected to the German Parliament

[00:10:57] in the reunified federal election of 1990. The way he does this is there's one district that is a CDU party stronghold, and we'll vote for whichever CDU candidate is on the ballot. So this guy puts Merkel on the ballot for this district, and she gets voted into Parliament.

[00:11:16] Which is crazy, given that literally a year ago he was just a random research scientist living behind the Berlin Wall. What's even crazier is that he managed to know all of this political climbing on top of transitioning in his life in a democratic capitalist country, which is a

[00:11:33] shocking and difficult transition for many East-Chermans like, whoa everyone's wearing these different clothes, so the trains run so fast, the West-Chermans looked down upon you for being poor and brainwashed. Anyway, on top of all this, what's even crazier is, soon after she's elected,

[00:11:50] she asked a colleague for an intro to Chancellor Helmet Cole, which was perfect because Chancellor Cole was on the lookout for someone to improve the male-dominated public image of his government. So after vending Merkel for a bit, Cole decided to offer her a position in his cabinet

[00:12:09] as the Minister for Women and Family Affairs. So that same year, 1990, Merkel goings the cabinet as a federal minister. A few years later, he is promoted to being Minister of the Environment as well.

[00:12:22] Her time in the cabinet was a great growing experience for her. First, she really figured out and grew into her persona as a politician. He's never really been into fact here in dressing up, which to be fair in the Communist economy of East-Chermany, everyone wore the same

[00:12:37] thing anyway, but she figured out a public wardrobe and hairstyle that worked for her. She also figured out a speaking style that worked for her, where she places her hands together in a sort of diamond shape when she speaks. This has become so iconic, actually,

[00:12:51] that it's known as the Merkel diamond now. He also toughened up emotionally. One time at a cabinet meeting, the chancellor was picking on her for some reason and just grilling her with tough questions. Since her childhood, her motto had always been to never show incompetence.

[00:13:07] But in this meeting, somehow he didn't have the answers to all the questions that the chancellor was throwing at her. And she started crying in front of all her male colleagues.

[00:13:17] She was mortified by this and figured out how to control her tears so that she never cried in a meeting again. She also showed a remarkable amount of savvy in building her team of staffers. Controversially, she fired some really competent people who worked for her predecessors

[00:13:33] and replaced them with people who shouldn't be loyal to her. This is again a move that many powerful people in history have been known to do, making sure that everyone who works for you

[00:13:43] is loyal above all. With her subordinates, she had extremely high standards. They had to be handed and avoid flattery. They had to be incredibly protective of her privacy. Leave any small detail about Merkel's private life, however, in consequential and year done.

[00:14:00] They had to be extremely precise when citing any facts or figures. One former aid went asked if he enjoyed working with Merkel for two decades, replied with a vehement no. Every minute was challenging, he said. Though Merkel never labeled herself a feminist,

[00:14:17] her inner circle consisted of two women who are incredibly in sync with her. When she gave speeches, they'd use hand gestures to tell her to speed up or smile a little. They'd be reading the same books as her at the same time without intending to,

[00:14:32] and they served her for almost 30 years. So in the meantime, Chancellor Colstart's select Merkel more and more. He becomes an increasingly involved mentor figure to her. Now, Colstart is one of these guys who loves to be

[00:14:46] super loud, domineering, and arrogant. He thinks he's going to go down in history as the great Chancellor Colstart who re-unified East and West Germany. So yes, he mentors her and gives her a lot of opportunities, but at the same time he patronizes and be little's her. He frequently

[00:15:02] perines her around and refers to her in public as... My Mitsion. Which means my little girl. People observed that Colstart seemed to view Merkel as a kind of trophy of German reunification.

[00:15:16] And Merkel puts up with it. She lets him believe that she's just a trophy figure if it won't threaten his leadership, and she milks it to keep gaining more power. Until the day, that Chancellor Colstart gets into a big scandal. Turns out, Col has been evading taxes

[00:15:34] and soliciting illegal political donations for the CDU. And this is a huge blow to the CDU. They're popularity in those times. It looks like they might be screwed in upcoming elections.

[00:15:45] At this point, Merkel is the Secretary General of the CDU. So her role should be to smooth over the scandal and try to rescue the party's public image. Instead, she knows the very opposite

[00:15:57] in an explosive move that ends up had a holding her career forward. What she does is, she writes an op-ed in a leading-cure man-meas paper that announces Chancellor Col with Serghehol and Denly Precision. She says directly that the CDU needs to get rid of Col and

[00:16:14] stand on its own two feet independent of him. Now, this is a huge deal because Col has been Chancellor for 16 years and is the face of the CDU. Furthermore, the unspoken role in politics

[00:16:27] has always been that if you're trying to stay your coup and get rid of someone in power, you don't just go off and announce that to the whole world. You're supposed to kind of maneuver

[00:16:36] that subtly. So, because Merkel's op-ed was so direct, it shocked the whole country and caused a huge stir. Now, Col thinks Merkel is his little girl, right? He just doesn't believe that

[00:16:48] he was capable of writing this op-ed all on her own. So, instead of blaming her, he convinces himself that his second in command was actually responsible for the op-ed and basically destroys that guy

[00:17:00] politically too. So, now the two most powerful men in the country have been wiped out and Merkel moves into position to take over. However, she has a rival named Meritz who's quite

[00:17:12] powerful within the party. For a while, it looks like it'll be either Meritz or Merkel for Chancellor. But then the conservative wing of the party starts to plot against Merkel. They want to prevent Merkel from running for a chancellor altogether and instead back another guy named Stoiber.

[00:17:29] So, Merkel sees that her opportunity is slipping away. In sheer designs to sacrifice her chance at becoming chancellor this year in order to gain power over Meritz and make a stronger run next time. So, she calls up Stoiber and she says, hey, I'll publicly endorse you for the

[00:17:46] chancellor ship. If you make me the parliamentary leader instead of Meritz, Stoiber says, okay, deal. So, a few weeks later, Merkel becomes parliamentary leader and party leader of the CDU. Meritz is absolutely appalled by this and he ends up actually leaving politics entirely because

[00:18:06] he realizes he can't outsmart Merkel. On her first day as CDU leader, Merkel strode into a conference room where the other CDU officials awaited. He looked around the room, announced everyone to stand up and disperse themselves randomly around the table. As a biographer comments, Meritz was messaged

[00:18:25] and he was clear. Don't bother plotting against me, I'm watching you. The CDU was annual Merkel's party now. Over the next five or so years, she continues growing her power and popularity within the party. In 2005, Angela Merkel becomes chancellor. It's inspiring to see how far

[00:18:45] Merkel go up without being charismatic, at least not in front of crowds. She's very charming and one-on-one settings, but she charms you in large part by being a great listener and an interesting conversationist. In front of crowds, she's really bad at stirring people's emotions

[00:19:01] at talking big. She just says things as they are plain and simple. She's known for her high integrity and she remains humble and modest, doing her own grocery shopping and living in a super low-key apartment throughout her entire time in power. And everyone she's close to, her family,

[00:19:19] her new husband, also mirrors her, in valuing duty and independence of thought over a simple blind loyalty. We already know her parents moved to East Germany in order to do their duty to God. Her parents also never voted for her because they disagreed with her party's politics.

[00:19:36] And her second-and-current husband, Yua Kim Sauer is the same way. Unlike most political spouses, Sauer only ever appears in public with Merkel once a year to attend an annual opera festival. He strictly refuses to answer any press questions about anything that doesn't directly

[00:19:54] pertain to his own chemistry research. One time, the Obama's invited Merkel and Sauer to dinner after a warning Merkel in the presidential matter of freedom. And Sauer said, no, sorry, I'm having dinner with my calling that night. There's probably a reason that

[00:20:09] Merkel has been married to this guy for 30 years in counting. Like her and her parents, he clearly values his own independent career and his obligations to his colleagues, oversharing in his wife's club. Even though in private there are strong signs that he supports

[00:20:25] and serves as a true political advisor and thought partner to her. I will say, though, that I'm not sure if her high integrity approach would have worked outside of post-war Germany. There's a stereotype that Germans are called unemotional and prefer for their public servants

[00:20:41] to me intellectuals rather than businessman. Insofar as that's true, Merkel fits in very well with this culture. On top of that, they were scarred by their experience with Hitler, who came to power by making eloquent speeches that rallished the masses.

[00:20:56] I read a memoir recently by a woman who grew up in Germany in the 80s and 90s. In the memoir, she pulls up an old-high school homorgasignment where the teacher begins by saying, he who possesses linguistic skills possesses people. And then asks the student to analyze

[00:21:13] Hitler's speech to understand the rhetorical devices that Hitler used to control his audience. He recalls, quote, in school, we struck the German words for hero, victory, battle and pride from our vocabularys. So as a country, they've been conditioned to believe that someone whose

[00:21:30] two eloquent is actually dangerous. Merkel herself actually really believes this, and intentionally didn't work on becoming a more eloquent speaker. So in this context, it makes sense to me that the German people would uniquely appreciate Merkel's style in a way that I just don't know

[00:21:46] if other cultures would. Okay, next let's talk about what she was like as chancellor. As chancellor, Merkel's style was all about compromise with both domestic and international leaders. Her male predecessors saw politics as an act of bravado and bullying others into doing things for you.

[00:22:06] Merkel saw politics as a rational game of given take, creating favors with other people to get as much of what you want as you can. Through this approach, she ended up achieving a lot. In her first year in power,

[00:22:19] 2005, she passed the major EU agreement, amended the German constitution, earned a popular re-reading of 89%, the highest ever reported by a chancellor, and was nominated time magazines personally year. I think her relationship with Vladimir Putin illustrates this strategy well.

[00:22:39] During their first meeting, Putin pulled a classic intimidation tactic on her. He knew that he was terrified of dogs, and so he brought his giant black dog to meet her. But Merkel stayed calm and spoke to him in her fluent Russian, which earned some of his respect.

[00:22:56] Later when Russian soldiers invaded Crimea in 2014, the international community immediately tried to criticize Putin. And Putin just replied, what? Those are my soldiers. They were just random Russian men. I didn't tell them to go into Crimea. A lot of other Western leaders were like,

[00:23:13] this is so frustrating I don't know how to deal with this response. But Merkel knew how to punish Putin. She understood that he desperately wanted to be recognized as a major player on the global stage.

[00:23:26] So to punish Putin, she canceled a G-tensomit that was supposed to be held in Russia, which was a huge blow to Putin's ego. Then she rallied the EU to impose economic sanctions on him. Ideologically, Merkel's biggest goal is to ensure that World War II does not repeat itself,

[00:23:43] and that Germany properly atones for its sins during this time. So she hates nationalism, and instead believes strongly in strengthening the EU. She has a quote near-reverential belief in America for a forwarding Western democracy and basically rebuilding Germany after the war.

[00:24:00] And she supports Israel, obviously, because of the Holocaust. As an example of her dedication to the EU, after the 2008 economic crisis, Greece's economy failed and the EU failed the melt. Two years later, Greece got a second bailout. Then in 2015, Merkel found herself yet again

[00:24:19] needing to negotiate a third bailout for Greece. The negotiations were tough because, on one hand, a lot of EU countries were fed up by having to repeatedly send money to Greece. On the other hand, Greek leaders were unwilling to accept the strict austerity measures

[00:24:35] that the EU wanted to impose on them in exchange for the money. So Greece was on the verge of deciding to just leave the EU on together, and a lot of EU leaders were in favor of this, including Germany's finance minister who was actively maneuvering

[00:24:52] for Greece to leave the EU. Merkel let him maneuver. But that Sunday night, Merkel casually suggested to the Greek Prime Minister that they got together to look over the bailout proposal without the German Finance Minister present. They went over the plan and excruciating

[00:25:10] the Greek Finance Minister recalls that Merkel used, quote, psychological manipulation and remarkable diligence to get them to sign off on a number of austerity measures that they had previously protested strongly too. At 445 AM the next morning,

[00:25:26] Merkel got the Greek leaders to sign off on an honestly humiliating set of pension cuts and tax and kept the EU together. In terms of domestic policy, pretty much all of her policies involve spotting an issue and figuring out the best most logical solution to it.

[00:25:44] She is not an ideological politician who tries to shape the country according to how she thinks it ought to look. She just deals with problems very pragmatically as they come up. The one glaring exception is her refugee policy. In 2015, a huge amount of serians started fleeing

[00:26:02] their civil war and trying to enter Europe. Many EU countries were horrified and rushed to close their borders. While Germany was deciding what to do, two things happened. First, at an EU meeting,

[00:26:14] the Hungarian Prime Minister said, quote, it is only a matter of time before Germany will be defense to keep their refugees out. When they have done so, then we'll have the kind of Europe I like. Merkel seemed really triggered. She paused and replied, quote,

[00:26:31] I lived a long time behind offense. It's not something I wish to do again. The second thing that happens is Merkel was doing a routine meet and greet with German residents and a refugee

[00:26:43] girl went up to the stage and talked about how much he liked being in Germany, how she hoped to go to college here and didn't want to go back to her war in turn home. She asked Merkel why

[00:26:53] you couldn't just stay in Germany and Merkel gave a really standard reply at first, but then the girl started crying. Merkel just seemed so visibly moved, almost to tears herself. Soon after that, she announced that Germany would not turn away any refugees.

[00:27:11] This represents a transformational moment for her. Primusely, everything Merkel ever did was the personification of cautious rational decision making as one byographer Prudet. Suddenly, she made an unpopular decision that seemed to come from the heart and from the

[00:27:29] Christian values of her childhood home. And she threw all of her carefully accumulated political capital behind it. 1.7 million people applied for asylum in Germany between 2015 and 2019. While some Germans were welcoming, others were concerned and skeptical. The skepticism and fear

[00:27:48] grew when there were a couple of terrorist attacks by Muslim refugees against the German public. The aftermath of her refugee policy revealed the greatest failings of her low charisma persona. I think when most decisions you make are rational, then sure you can explain it in a monotone way

[00:28:06] and people would be like, okay if that makes sense. But when it comes to a decision to accept a huge flood of Middle Eastern refugees in the wake of terrorism, that's something that you

[00:28:17] really need to appeal to people's hearts for. Partly as a result of this, the right-wing nationalist party that AFD was able to start gaining faction and gaining seats in parliament. A common criticism of Merkel is that if she were more charismatic, better appealing to emotions,

[00:28:33] more proactive in listening to the feelings of right-wing Germans, that AFD wouldn't be as much of a threat as they've now become. For some at all of, we learned about Angela Merkel's early life in East Germany, where she showed early signs of discipline, intelligence and an act for

[00:28:48] understanding people. Interestingly, one thing she has in common with Anna Winter from our previous episode is that both and stern fathers with high standards, and both were highly-perfectiistic and self-controlled as co-grin. We talked about the rapid changes the country went through once

[00:29:06] the Berlin Wall fell and the opportunities it created for Merkel to rise quickly in politics. We learned about how she was extremely strategic in seizing these opportunities, convincing powerful people that she'd be a competent and unthreatening ally,

[00:29:20] using her identity as a woman to her advantage, and willingly being the token woman, and letting them underestimate her, and then making strong surprise moves to gain power. All without compromising on her integrity and straightforwardness. We explored her legacy as an

[00:29:35] effective discipline, and as the chancellor who welcomed refugees to Germany with open arms. Thanks for listening.