What Does Merkel Want, Apart from Raising the Dead?
The congresses of the German Christian-Democrat Parties CDU and CSU, and the German Social-Democrat SPD have endorsed Germany’s new ‘Black-Red” coalition government, led by CDU leader Angela Merkel. One of the things the new coalition wants to do is to revive the EU constitutional treaty when Berlin takes over the helm of the European Union in January 2007. Though the Christian-Democrats endorsed the new coalition, critics within Merkel’s own party feel uneasy about the party giving up so much of its program. The influential conservative newspaper Die Welt writes today that “Nobody knows […] the direction in which Merkel wants to take the country.” The paper complains that Merkel is back-pedalling on all the free market reforms she promised during the election campaign. Die Welt asks: “What does Angela Merkel want? There is only one sure answer to this often-asked but never-resolved question. She wants to be chancellor, the first woman in the history of the Federal Republic of German
