German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who turned 60 on Thursday, is likely to be less than impressed by the presents and tributes given to her so far.
On Wednesday, European Council President Herman Van Rompuy presented her with a No 60 Germany shirt that not only looked a cheap replica version of the real thing, but also seemed to be missing the all-important fourth star denoting the team’s latest World Cup win — a detail that would not have escaped football fan Merkel.
Tabloid Bild had recorded a cheesy schlager version of an old folk song called We Love the Storms, the Wuthering Waves with Merkel’s parliamentary colleagues — most of whom were only marginally better at holding a tune than the journalist who tried to serenade her on Thursday morning.
At a press conference in Brussels, the bureau chief of public broadcaster ZDF had launched into a rendition of Happy Birthday, Liebe Bundeskanzlerin (dear chancellor), but awkwardly failed to get any back-up from his colleagues.
At least it gave Merkel the opportunity for a smart putdown.
“I should have sung along, then it would have been better. But thank you,” she said.
Had the German Democratic Republic never collapsed, Merkel would have retired this week, as Left party politician Stefan Liebich said in a surprisingly approving piece on her legacy in the political magazine Cicero. Instead, she is widely regarded as the most powerful politician in Europe, and enjoys a remarkable 77 percent popularity rating in Germany.
Rather than collect her pension, Merkel received 1,000 guests at a party at the Christian Democratic Union’s Berlin headquarters on Thursday night.
The fact that a lecture by the historian Jurgen Osterhammel was set to provide the centerpiece of festivities triggered a wave of speculation among political journalists.
Osterhammel is best known for his 2009 bestseller The Transformation of the World — released in English this year — in which he argues that the 19th century was not a century of nationalism, but of interconnected empires, an age of globalization.
Some journalists have read it as yet another sign that Merkel has lost interest in domestic politics and is preoccupied with challenges on the global stage.
Since the start of her third term in December last year, she has been embroiled in an espionage row with the US, played a key negotiation role in the Ukraine crisis, been to China on a state visit and tried to mediate between Britain and Brussels during the fallout over the appointment of European Commission president-elect Jean-Claude Juncker.
Rumors that Merkel would become the first German chancellor to step down while in power, which first surfaced last year, have been circulating again this week.
“She seems not to be putting much heart into the issues on her to-do list,” wrote Nikolaus Blome in Der Spiegel magazine, speculating that she may have an eye on either the presidency of the European Council or the top post at the UN.
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