U.S. President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel (R) chat during at the Chralottenburg Castle in Berlin June 19, 2013. REUTERS/Michael Sohn/Pool
Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign had a bit of magic to it, in the sense that he drew enormous crowds and ginned up energy like no other politician in recent memory. And the phenomenon was not confined to the United States. On the contrary, the single largest (and wildest) speech he ever gave was in Berlin that summer, his ascent a symbol of the potential for peace and a reset from the foreign policy chaos of the Bush years.
We got a sense of the rather changed playing field this week when Obama was back in Germany with the smell of the National Security Agency’s spying controversy still fresh on him. For one thing, the crowd at his Brandenburg Gate address was just 4,500 strong, compared to the 200,000 plus who filled a park in downtown Berlin for him five years ago. Chancellor Angela Merkel, looking ahead to her own re-election this September in a country with not one but two massive, pernicious legacies of domestic spying under the Nazi and East German regimes, respectively, raised the surveillance question with Obama, and told the cameras she did, too. While she and the American president actually appear to get along quite well, having weathered financial crises and other international incidents together for some years now, it was important for the conservative leader to be seen as sensitive to civil liberties violations. Obama was not entirely above scrutiny, even if Merkel ultimately agreed with his contention that the surveillance of phone and Internet data saved lives in both countries by helping investigators prevent terrorist attacks.
The question is whether the incident will have lasting side-effects as Merkel gears up to reinvigorate (and centralize) the German right for her campaign after it’s struggled to maintain cohesion in the face of the steady regional decline in support for the European Union — which often feels like a distinctly German project. Obama’s approval numbers, according to recent data from Pew, show he remains extraordinarily popular there: 88 percent of the German public say they have confidence Obama will do the right thing in world affairs. But it’s worth noting that the survey was conducted before the recent NSA revelations, and there is reason to believe the president’s numbers will decline a bit from here on out, as the drop in turnout at his address indicated. So Merkel’s challenge is to capitalize on whatever remaining goodwill — and it does appear to be considerable, and relatively unique to Germany — there is toward Obama without her left-wing critics being able to tie her to his more authoritarian impulses. It would require a bit of ingenuity to connect Merkel’s strong hand in managing the eurozone with Obama’s foreign policy excesses in the public imagination, a task left to the AfD, an anti-E.U. conservative party still putting itself together. In any case, Merkel has decided Obama is not toxic. It remains to be seen if any of her rivals decide otherwise.
