How many major crises has Angela Merkel already experienced in her long term as Chancellor?
The international financial crisis, the euro crisis, the Greece crisis, the refugee crisis, Brexit, the climate crisis, the Corona crisis, to name just the most important.
Not to mention domestic political stress tests such as the almost rift with the CSU, which, on the other hand, seem almost small.
Merkel can do a crisis - the Chancellor has worked hard for this reputation among Germans over the past 16 years.
Oliver Georgi
Deputy Editor in Charge of News and Politics Online.
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Merkel will no longer have to answer the long-term political consequences of what is probably her chancellor's last international crisis, the failed mission in Afghanistan and the victory of the Taliban. But her potential successor in the Chancellery. Even before the images of desperate Afghans clinging to an American military plane at Kabul airport shook the world, a heated debate in the federal election campaign began in Germany: Did the federal government start too late to fly the German embassy staff and Afghan aid workers out of Kabul ? What conclusions must German foreign policy draw for the future from the twenty-year deployment debacle? Does Kabul also have consequences for German engagement in Mali? And, more fundamentally:Has the concept of “nation building”, which failed so miserably in Afghanistan due to tribal loyalty and a corrupt political culture, been sustained and finally taken ad absurdum?
Whoever succeeds Angela Merkel in the Chancellery will have to find long-term answers to these questions in order to restore confidence in the sustainability of Western foreign policy. And the last few weeks of the federal election campaign, the high points of which have so far been embellished résumés and too much hilarity in the wrong place, should also determine the issue of Afghanistan - above all the question of how to deal with possible refugees.
How heated this debate is likely to become in the coming weeks was already outlined on Monday, when Union Chancellor candidate Armin Laschet spoke out against a blanket German promise to accept Afghan refugees and warned against repeating the "mistakes of 2015".
In the social media this caused gasping among the political opponents, also because the WDR spread the quotes on Twitter with the spin that Laschet “does not want to take in any refugees from Afghanistan”.
A few hours later, the broadcaster corrected itself in another tweet and stated that a dpa report on Laschet's interview had been "shortened": "It is our mistake that our tweet allows the interpretation that Laschet does not want to accept any refugees."
A heated debate is inevitable
The exegesis of Laschet's statement that Germany should now “not send out the signal that Germany can quasi accept everyone who is now in need” is likely to be continued heatedly in the coming days. And regardless of the question of whether a link between the dramatic images from Kabul and the refugee issue is already permitted or not, the top candidates with Afghanistan are faced with a litmus test in dealing with Merkel's most controversial legacy.
Armin Laschet will want to prevent those in the conservative regular clientele who have turned away from the Union because of Merkel's refugee policy from being afraid of a déjà vu with Afghan refugees.
The SPD, the Left and the Greens, on the other hand, will try to differentiate themselves from Laschet with a "great humanitarian gesture" (Joschka Fischer) and the demand for a much more generous quota solution.
This is how it is in this increasingly unusual election campaign: A huge domestic political catastrophe - the flood disaster on the Ahr - is now being followed by a foreign policy one in Afghanistan.
On the Ahr, Armin Laschet did not always look confident.
It is all the more important for him to now show his stature as a far-sighted foreign politician.
The same applies, of course, to Baerbock and Olaf Scholz.
Germany's security is no longer being defended in Afghanistan. But maybe German election campaigns will be decided there.