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“... must still pass through Ukraine, but that may not be the case for much longer. In November 2011, Angela Merkel and Dmitry Medvedev met in Lubmin, on Germany’s north-east coast. Together with an assortment of European politicians they turned a tap meant to symbolise the opening of the Nord Stream gas pipeline. Unlike the old pipeline system, Nord ...”

“... address a public forum on pressing global issues, for example, or go for a girls’ night out with Angela Merkel. As we close in on the one and only H-Factor, even I, mistress of a thousand exclamation marks, cannot capture our blithery exaltation. Granted, there’d been a moment of consternation earlier: the virtual invitation had said ‘Business ...”

“... else. ‘No,’ he answered. I later discovered his identity: Martin Schulz, now running against Angela Merkel. As he put it back in October, when president of the European Parliament: ‘I refuse to imagine a Europe where lorries and hedge funds are free to cross borders but citizens are not.’ Liam Fox resigned on 14 October 2011, four days before I ...”

“... thought to make sense, but the voters don’t fancy Peer Steinbrück. They are pissed off with Angela Merkel’s governing coalition, but reluctant to let go of Mutti’s hand. In short, the public are in one of those sullen, unreasonable moods which make politicians despair. Steinbrück deserves some sympathy. He is an over-experienced ...”

“... to the people in a referendum. He regrets that he didn’t get a better deal in his battles with Merkel and Juncker but insists it wasn’t for want of trying. But the sequencing here is back to front. Renegotiation then referendum was Cameron’s mantra. That was never going to work. The referendum had to come before the renegotiation if he was going to ...”

“... dreamed of, in those hectic years before 1914, was a stiller Führer of Mitteleuropa – an Angela Merkel before her time. These are​ beguiling scenarios, but they in their turn deserve a little interrogation. Suppose, to start with, that Churchill had let the British fleet disperse and the German Navy had nipped in and steamed up the Channel to ...”

“... than two thousand in 1980. It expanded again during the war on terror, and then in the wake of Angela Merkel’s opening of the German border in 2015. By 2022 it had a staff of more than four thousand and a budget of €440 million. In the meantime all sixteen federal states, the Länder, had established Verfassungsschutz offices of their ...”

“... cow to be milked by feckless Southerners? But it was the escalating refugee crisis, culminating in Angela Merkel’s decision to open the borders over the weekend of 5 and 6 September 2015, that really split the country. Fully a third of Germans are thought to have contributed to refugee relief, through donations, volunteering or opening their ...”

“... payroll at a salary larger than he received for governing the country. Since his departure, Angela Merkel has seen two presidents of the Republic in succession forced to resign under a cloud: Horst Köhler, a former chief of the IMF, for explaining that the Bundeswehr contingent in Afghanistan was protecting German commercial interests; and ...”

“... sense. Try as they might, even the most hawkish American policymakers will struggle to represent Angela Merkel as a security threat.This disavowal of the obvious connection between trade and security policy is the hallmark of an earlier era, which we are in the process of leaving behind. One of the effects of America’s unipolar dominance in the wake ...”

“... conservatives had never been as keen on the slogan There Is No Alternative as Margaret Thatcher or Angela Merkel. Under Trump there was simply no limit to the GOP’s opportunism. Typically, the centre and left did more intellectual work to come to terms with the new situation. The IMF’s former chief economist, Olivier Blanchard, had painstakingly ...”

“... is interesting that these arguments about Kafka’s German are recirculating now, just as Angela Merkel has announced the failure of multiculturalism in Germany and marshalled as evidence the further claim that new immigrants, and indeed their ‘children and grandchildren’, fail to speak German correctly. She has publicly admonished such ...”

“... party remained unconditionally pro-European. The first test of the coalition’s mettle came when Angela Merkel decided, shortly before the 2010 British election, that it was essential the EU revise its treaties, adding a Fiscal Compact that would bind every government to rigid budgetary discipline, to check the danger of the Union unravelling amid ...”

“... ride when he moved from Germany’s Interior Ministry to its Finance Ministry on 28 October 2009. Angela Merkel’s new coalition with the Free Democratic Party (FDP), the free market Liberals, was committed to reducing the government deficit. That summer the preceding Grand Coalition – the name for a coalition involving Germany’s two largest ...”

“... relating to the referendum result that are very difficult to assess. Would a concession from Merkel allowing an emergency brake on the free movement of workers have been enough to tip the balance? Would either Johnson or Gove have gone it alone if the other hadn’t been there to provide cover? Did the murder of Jo Cox, counter-intuitively, harden rather ...”