Last week, Angela Merkel did something she had never done before in her 14 years as Germany’s chancellor. She went on national television to address the nation.

It was a historic moment. Germany had shut down schools and shops and sealed its borders in a desperate attempt to slow the advance of coronavirus. Factories were closed and millions stuck at home. A near palpable sense of alarm and confusion stalked the streets.

Ms Merkel’s demeanour was calm but her tone insistent. We must all, she said, reduce our social lives to a minimum. Keep our distance from people. Avoid contact with the elderly, even our own grandparents. Show some solidarity. An uncharacteristically personal note crept in, a reference to her life in communist East Germany. “For someone like me, for whom freedom of movement was a hard-fought right, such restrictions can only be justified by their absolute necessity,” she said.

No one had seen Ms Merkel speak to the nation on TV, outside her perfunctory New Year’s Eve addresses. Few had seen her show such empathy and emotion. The impact was correspondingly huge: some 30m people watched the 12-minute speech. They knew they were in the safe hands of Europe’s most experienced crisis manager. “Her style of leadership was out of fashion for a long time, but now it’s exactly what people need,” says Stefan Kornelius, Ms Merkel’s biographer. “You want someone like her who projects stability and maturity. Someone who isn’t tweeting every five minutes.”

Cometh the hour, cometh the Merkel, her supporters say. Strongmen and showmen might have their uses during peacetime, but in a pandemic, with the economy in a downward spiral and millions afraid, you need a cool head.

Even after Ms Merkel went into quarantine last Monday, having come into contact with a doctor who tested positive for Covid-19, there was no doubt in most Germans’ minds who was in charge. “She analyses the situation very precisely and, unlike others, listens to the advice of experts,” says Jürgen Hardt, foreign affairs spokesman for Ms Merkel’s party, the Christian Democratic Union. It’s not surprising she once cited Marie Curie, the physicist who discovered radium, as her role model.

Western Europe’s longest-serving leader, 65-year-old Ms Merkel has been here before. She steered Germany through the 2008 financial meltdown, the eurozone debt crisis, and the migration emergency of 2015-16, when more than a million refugees entered Europe. Through it all she conveyed quiet competence and a minimum of fuss.

Her return to the role of the nation’s Mutti (or mummy) has taken some by surprise, however. Ms Merkel’s fourth and final term has been a hard slog: the “grand coalition” she presides over with the Social Democrats has been riven by constant bickering, while uncertainty over who will succeed her as chancellor has destabilised German politics.

CDU conservatives still cannot forgive her for keeping the country’s borders open during the refugee crisis, a decision that fuelled political tensions and gave a huge boost to the far-right Alternative for Germany, now established in all 16 regional parliaments.

None of that seems to matter now. Her government has jumped into action, pushing through a €156bn emergency budget to protect the economy. For Germans, says Manfred Güllner, one of the country’s leading pollsters, Ms Merkel is “the living safety-net”. Her party is up 4 points at 36 per cent, the AfD down 4 points at 9.

Through it all, she has been her usual imperturbable self. Katja Leikert, a CDU MP, took part in a conference call with senior party figures on Tuesday, and was impressed, as ever, by Ms Merkel’s style: “Some of the people on the call were mansplaining for ages, and she spoke for just two minutes.”

Ms Merkel’s reticence has deep roots, originating in her upbringing in East Germany. She once said that “learning when to keep quiet was a great advantage in the GDR period”. It was, she said, “one of our survival strategies”.

A pastor’s daughter who became a physicist, she entered politics after the fall of the Berlin Wall and rose quickly to become a minister in the cabinet of Helmut Kohl. When he became embroiled in a party funding scandal, she turned on him and snatched the leadership of the CDU. As chancellor she won four consecutive elections and, in recent years, has become a symbol of western liberal values scorned by nationalists such as US president Donald Trump.

But her status as Europe’s pre-eminent stateswoman faces a historic test. Some in Brussels believe the continent is now facing its worst peacetime crisis. Eurozone leaders may need to rally behind the single currency to save it from break-up. So far, though, there is little sign of co-ordinated European action.

Ms Merkel will have do what is necessary to ensure the euro’s survival without alienating her compatriots. She once described the eurozone crisis as “like being in a dark room, so dark that you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face and you have to grope your way forward”. This crisis could be even more disorientating.

But as she girds herself for the monumental task of rescuing Germany and Europe, she at least enjoys wide support. Even opposition politicians give her the thumbs-up.

“In a crisis like this,” Green MP Konstantin von Notz tweeted this month, “we can only be happy that we have a chancellor like Angela Merkel.”



guy.chazan@ft.com

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