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Merkel’s legacy for Germany in charts

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German Chancellor Angela Merkel in 2011 visiting the laboratory for chemical engineering at the chemical plant of the Dow Olefinverbund GmbH in Schkopau, near Merseburg, eastern Germany.

AFP – Getty Images Hard to believe that Germany was once the most prosperous and largest country in Europe. This is despite the fact that it has been referred to as “the sick man of Europe” during the 1990s and 2000s.| AFP | Getty Images

It’s hard to believe now that Germany, Europe’s biggest and most successful economy, was once known as the “sick man of Europe” in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Germany’s economy has grown significantly under Angela Merkel, the Conservative leader and head of government over the last 16 years. In 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic struck, a quarter (24.7%) of the European Union’s entire gross domestic product was generated by Germany, according to Eurostat.

CNBC created five charts that show different aspects of Germany’s society and economy during Merkel’s time. According to political experts, they show that her legacy was not just one of success but also one filled with missed opportunities and mistakes.

GDP

Germany’s export-oriented economy, one predicated heavily on manufacturing, has grown steadily during Merkel’s time in office, this chart shows, and has far outpaced its rivals in the U.K. and France.

ThyssenKrupp’s cokery facility on Rhine in Duisburg (western Germany) in 2019.

AFP, Getty Images Unemployment According to the World Bank, Merkel’s unemployment rate dropped from 11.1% in 2005, to 3.8% by 2020.| AFP | Getty Images

Unemployment

Goldman Sachs analysts analyzed Merkel’s legacy. They noted that Merkel was a “great success in lowering the unemployment rate”, but “much” of this decline came from Merkel’s predecessor (Gerhard Schroeder), and was followed by a decade in stagnant real wage growth.

Angela Merkel visited a Georgsmarienhuette steel mill on August 30, 2005.

Photothek | Photothek | Getty Images

The analysts noted that Merkel’s governments had nonetheless then “maintained sound public finances and adopted the constitutional debt brake, but responded forcefully during times of crisis, successfully shielding the labour market with the “Kurzarbeit” programme in 2008 and 2020.”

Kurzarbeit is Germany’s scheme for short-term employment that allows employers to reduce the hours of their workers instead of cutting them during crisis situations like the Covid pandemic.

Immigration

One area where Germany differs starkly from its counterparts France and the U.K. is its immigration landscape under Merkel. This is the area in which her chancelery received both praise and criticism.

Syrian and Iraqi migrants wait on railway tracks to cross the Macedonian border in Idomeni (Greece) September 2, 2015. The number of migrants who use the so-called “Balkans route” has increased dramatically since 2015. They arrived from Turkey, and have been travelling through Macedonia and Serbia to reach the EU. People fleeing conflict-affected countries like Syria represent the greatest migration in human history.

Getty Images

At the height of Europe’s migration crisis in 2014-2015, hundreds of thousands of migrants entered the EU, many of them fleeing civil war in Syria. There were heated arguments within the bloc about how to distribute asylum seekers equally between EU countries. Eastern European countries refused and closed their borders, leading to a split in the bloc.

Merkel took the bold step of opening Germany’s borders to allow more than 1 million migrants and refugees to come to Germany in 2015. The graph below shows this. Eurostat data on immigration goes back as far as 2008

The Eurostat immigration data only goes back to 2008. Its vote share had dropped to 10.3% in 2021.

Disposable income

The growing income gap between the wealthy and the poor is a key issue in discussions about household income in Germany. There is a significant difference between the west and east of Germany, which is a result of Germany’s post-unification years in 1990.

In 2020, the OECD noted that while differences between German regions, in terms of GDP per capita, had decreased over the last 18 years, “regional disparities among remain above the median of OECD countries, with Hamburg having more than twice the GDP per capita than Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (a neighboring state).”

In Mannheim, Germany, shoppers browse the items on sale in a gift shop.

Krisztian Bocsi, Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

As Euromonitor International noted in a September report, “despite the income growth and initiatives to promote income equality, regional disparities persist between eastern and western parts of Germany.”

Public investment

One of the main criticisms leveled at Merkel’s government is that it has neglected infrastructure spending and investment because of its apparent unwillingness to borrow money and upset its strict adherence to a balanced budget, with the now infamous “schwarze Null,” or “black zero” budget rule seen as a symbol of Germany’s obsession with penny-pinching.

This lack of spending has led to the destruction of Germany’s infrastructure. The government was widely criticised for cutting back borrowing and spending when it could borrow cheaply in a low-interest environment. Other critics have pointed out that Germany’s low spending has led to imbalances within the euro area.

Stefan Koopman from Rabobank’s senior market economist stated that “the failure of Germany’s government, among others, to engage in debt financing spending after the crisis of 2008/2011 has contributed significantly to the chronic shortage of private demand, tilted saving and investment balance and distortive global, intra-euro area trade imbalances.”

In 2021, a national election poster was displayed by the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), party at a construction site for residential apartments in Berlin’s Mitte district. There is a consensus across all parties about the need for more public infrastructure investment after many years of inadequate investments.

Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

The graph below shows patchy levels of gross capital formation (formerly known as gross domestic investment) in Germany, the U.K. and France since 2005.

Capital formation is the addition to fixed assets such as land and plant improvements, as well as machinery and equipment purchases. It also includes the construction of roads and railways and other infrastructures like schools, offices, and hospitals.

Experts say Germany’s next government should invest in this infrastructure.

Experts agree that Germany can’t delay spending on infrastructure. As coalition talks are underway to create a new government in Germany, much of the attention will be on each side pushing for fiscal ease.

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