Last year, a statue of former German chancellor Angela Merkel collapsed. Unable to handle the conditions in which it was placed, and riven with many cracks, the edifice that looked so strong to the outside collapsed under the internal strain. If a scriptwriter had come up with this as a metaphor, it would have been rejected as being far too on the nose.

As Merkel prepares to launch her memoir, nearly four years after leaving office, and with the world a vastly different place to when she left, it is a good time to assess her legacy. To some, including Barack Obama (alongside whom she launches her memoir in the USA) and the sorts of people who listen to The Rest Is Politics, she represented a sane, admirable technocratic leadership. She was not just the archetypal “grown up in the room”, she was Mutti; the mater patriae of Germany and all of Europe.

Rory Stewart, second to no one in his appreciation for Merkel’s supposedly excellent leadership, once said: “Angela Merkel is such an unusual and impressive political leader. And she succeeds by avoiding high rhetoric and bombast and making moderation and understatement powerful”. Breathless enthusiasm from otherwise discerning historians like Simon Schama followed in agreement. 

This was part of a wider enthusiasm for the superiority of the German model, both economic, political and diplomatic, that grew and grew in Britain following the Brexit vote. Probably the best known of this was a book, Why the Germans Do It Better: Notes from a Grown-Up Country, by John Kampfner. Kampfner argued that Germany under Merkel enjoyed success thanks to its commitment to democracy, well-balanced social market economy, and effective response to the refugee situation.

It is a thesis that has aged like fine milk.

German military weakness is perhaps the principal NATO weakness

The music stopped almost exactly as Merkel left the centre stage. Early in the Ukraine war, as silly, isolated and irrelevant Brexit Britain led the world in standing up for democracy, Germany stepped up and offered … 5,000 helmets. Merkel’s successor Olaf Scholz eventually realised that this would not be enough and pledged much more materiel. But the state of the Bundeswehr doesn’t exactly allow for nearly as much support as Germany should be capable of giving; not since the author was born has Germany got close to its NATO commitment of 2 per cent GDP spending.

German military weakness is perhaps the principal NATO weakness. And that weakness has emboldened the likes of Putin to make ever-more audacious actions. All those who accuse Donald Trump of a lack of commitment to NATO are wrong — Trump has been consistent in trying to make Europeans pay their own fair share of the defence of their own continent, decades after America liberated and protected much of it from first the Nazis and then the Soviets.

Merkel seemed to quietly revel in this weakness, focusing on German economic strength. But this, too, was built on a schloss of sand. A devastating book by Wolfgang Munchau, Kaput, reads as a brutal repudiation of both Merkel’s forthcoming tome, and all the ink spilled in praise of Germany.

Page after page of Kaput highlights the vicious cycles that Germany has allowed itself to be dragged down into. Much of this was not Merkel’s fault; truly wicked characters like Gerhard Schröder sold much of Germany down the river years before. His close contacts to Vladimir Putin, and sitting on the board of Rosneft, the Russian state-owned oil company, is the worst example of this.

But her domination of Germany for so long would have allowed Merkel the political capital to address the many structural weaknesses exposed by Kaput. Instead, she merely reacts to event after event in the most headline chasing, short-termist way. If Boris Johnson had been half as cheaply reactive, The Rest is Politics would never let you forget it. 

Merkel reacted to the Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan by banning all new nuclear stations in Germany and promising to phase out old ones. This, a cause pushed by the Greens, has led to Germany having to open COAL plants again.  (Indeed, in recent days the German greens have been exposed for using taxpayer cash to spread lies about nuclear energy.)

Merkel reacted to a destabilised Middle East, and an aging population in Europe, by opening the doors of her country to over a million fighting age Muslim men, saying “Wir schaffen das!” — We can do this! The results are heartbreaking. 

First there were the sexual assaults at New Year’s 2015/2016, where the police were told to remove the word rape from their reports. Then the spike in terrorist attacks came; most recently the stabbings at the “Festival of Diversity” in Solingen (another metaphor that would be rejected for being too obvious if not true). 

And just last week the Berlin Police Chief warned that gay people and Jews needed to “hide their identity” in Arab neighbourhoods of the City’s capital. It turns out that Wir can’t actually Schaffen Das, after all.

The only time Mutti didn’t react was when it was discovered that the German jewel in the crown, the car industry, was fitting cars with devices to mask their emissions output. Rather than smell the deep rot that has now seen the automobile sector splutter and lose out to Chinese electric vehicles, she did nothing to try to modernise the increasingly Potemkin economy. 

Angela Merkel is lucky that the bar for worst-ever German leader is as high as it i

And now? She is unapologetic. The big problems to her seem to be Trump, and that Elon Musk owns so many satellites. (Those would be the satellites that provide the Starlink system that Ukraine uses to defend itself against Russia.) Her diplomatic handling of Russia was so poor that some conspiracy theories contend she is a Russian plant. So disastrous was her decision to make Germany reliant on Russian energy that she might as well have been. I will never forget the German UN delegation laughing at Trump for saying they were “totally dependent” on Putin. Who’s laughing now?

Far from being the model leader that all others should follow, Angela Merkel is lucky that the bar for worst-ever German leader is as high as it is.