In autumn 2002 Angela Merkel lost an election and won a friend.

The defeat in the Bundestag election in September was preceded by her party's forced renunciation of her own candidacy for chancellor at the beginning of the year.

In November, however, the CDU chairwoman Merkel flew to Paris.

There she wanted to help Jacques Chirac, the French president who had just won his re-election, in his endeavors to form a new party out of his supporters.

Three years later, in autumn 2005, Angela Merkel also won an election.

And soon a friend, British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Johannes Leithäuser

Political correspondent in Berlin.

  • Follow I follow

The new Chancellor immediately rendered both of them a service of friendship. At the next EU summit, her first as the German head of government, she untied the knot that Blair, Chirac and others had previously tied in a serious dispute over the next seven-year budget of the European Union. This success, achieved after less than three months in her tenure as Chancellor, established Angela Merkel's foreign policy reputation - a reputation to which she has contributed thorough preparation and personal qualities.

The foreign policy learning curve of the East German CDU politician has its zero point, if early private forays through the Soviet Union do not count, in 1990. At that time, Merkel, as deputy government spokeswoman for the last GDR Prime Minister Lothar de Maizière, had the first opportunity to take on foreign policy in a government role close up to look at. She flew with de Maizière to Washington, New York and Moscow - and already at that time gave her surroundings examples of her fearless pragmatism, for example by simply giving the journalists who traveled from East Berlin, a handful of East and West Germans, the status of delegation members awarded. They were able to follow the end of the two-plus-four negotiations on the unification of Germany directly in the vestibule of the boardroom of a Moscow hotel.And then toast the successful conclusion at an impromptu reception in the presence of Soviet President Gorbachev.

During her time as Federal Minister in Bonn, Merkel then received practical foreign policy instruction at the cabinet table. First and foremost, Helmut Kohl's legacy was his close and firm ties with France. His successor adopted it without ever being irritated by French attitudes - neither courteoisie nor chauvinism. Merkel accepted Chriac's kiss on the hand with a hint of a smile, and in 2002 she addressed the 10,000 supporters of his founding party meeting in fearless French. At that time, she was still three years away from her own chancellorship, but already worried that the French conservatives would orient themselves more towards Spain and Italy and thus make the German position in the European Union more difficult.

In the sixteen years of her reign, Merkel has always made sure that Germany and France are as close to each other as possible - even if the volatility of Nicolas Sarkozy, the phlegm of François Hollande, the impetuousness of Emmanuel Macron may have made this difficult. At the French request, Merkel sent the Bundeswehr to Africa; conversely, she took the French President with her to Moscow and Minsk in order to jointly contain the conflict in eastern Ukraine. There was only one crash. When Sarkozy, together with the British government in particular, carried out the military operation in Libya, Merkel did not follow him.