An Insider Look at How Angela Merkel Lost Her Grip

Angela Merkel didn’t flinch, and the brickbats kept coming. At a private meeting with her party’s lawmakers on June 12, 2018, speaker after speaker got up to attack her refugee policy and endorse the enemy within her coalition government, Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, a hardliner on immigration. The chancellor’s advisers had never seen her suffer such sustained fire from her own troops. “What’s the strategy?” one Merkel aide asked a colleague in an SMS from the sidelines of the meeting in Berlin’s Reichstag. “I don’t know,” replied his colleague. “I don’t think we have one.”

After 13 years in power, Merkel had run out of ideas for keeping the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in line. She barely said a word throughout the meeting, and when it ended, no one knew what would happen next. The following week would see Merkel and Seehofer battle until she promised to muster support for her refugee policy from the rest of Europe at an upcoming summit. Seehofer desisted—for a while.