SPIEGEL ONLINE - June 8, 2007, 04:09 PM
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,487471,00.html

MERKEL'S G-8 TOUR DE FORCE

Germany's Green Chancellor

By Gerd Langguth

This year's G-8 summit has been a considerable success for German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Merkel biographer Gerd Langguth analyzes her strategy and explains how she came up with the goods.

When the German chancellor stepped between the world's gray-clad leaders in Heiligendamm, the color of her jacket set the agenda. It was green. The chancellor already knew when she selected her clothes in the morning that this would be her day, the day of her "climate victory."

Despite the predictable knee-jerk reactions of the political opposition and some environmental organizations, who vocally expressed their disappointment with the G-8 climate deal, Merkel has reason to be pleased with the outcome of the negotiations.

At the beginning of the summit, the organizers still deliberately kept expectations low with regard to climate protection goals. So how did the successful negotiations come about?

During the weeks before the summit, Merkel made the most important political meeting of 2007 her very own cause, constantly speeding up the pace of her activities and preparing the ground for the summit with an unprecedented bout of intensive telephone diplomacy.

While the sherpas, who were supposed to be preparing the summit on behalf of their bosses, were still stuck in the trenches of their various national interests, the chancellor managed to entice those leaders who were still on the fence to participate in her program by tempting them with the prospect of positive reactions from the international community.

In doing so, Merkel profited from her participation in the Kyoto Protocol negotiations as Germany's then environment minister: She was more familiar with the details of the issue than the other seven G-8 leaders, and hence was less dependent on the preparatory work of the sherpas than her colleagues at the summit.

Her knowledge of Russian also makes for an emotional bond to Putin, notwithstanding the fact that the Russian president, a former KGB agent who used to live in Dresden, speaks fluent German. Merkel's good knowledge of English is helpful when it comes to Bush.

Merkel's ability to conduct genuinely confidential talks with Bush and Putin, without an interpreter or a note taker present, makes it easier for her to sound out political options.

By comparison, most politicians are lost without their sherpas. Merkel's predecessors Kohl or Schröder neither had comparable expert knowledge of the issue, nor were they capable, in terms of their language skills, of confidential talks without interpreters. Surely if G-8 summits make sense, then their justification consists precisely in the world's powerful being able to approach and engage with each other outside pre-determined negotiation rituals, in a relaxed conversational atmosphere.

Winning over Bush

And yet it was clear to Merkel from the start that US President George W. Bush held the key to the success or failure of the G-8 summit. Her warm personal relationship to the Texan was another reason for the success of the negotiations. Recall how during last's year G-8 summit in St. Petersburg Bush affectionately gave Merkel a neck massage when he came into the negotiation room. This not only led to images that provoked much hilarity -- it also symbolized the relaxed relationship between the two. But notwithstanding all the mutual sympathy, national interests are what influence leaders when they make decisions.

How was Merkel able to win the US president over at the last moment? She made it clear to him that coming around was in his own interest.

The front of Kyoto rejecters has long been disintegrating in the United States. Led by Californian Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, US states have joined forces and put pressure on the federal government by means of their own independent climate policies. Calls from US mayors, and also from multinational companies who view the US decision to reject the Kyoto Protocol as a mistake, are getting ever louder.

Bush realized during his frequent telephone conversations and confidential talks with Merkel that coming around on the issue of climate change is good for his own image too -- not just internationally, but also within the United States. After all, the US leader knows the end of his term is in sight, and he is faced with the question of whether he wants history to judge him solely on the basis of a failed war in Iraq.

Merkel wisely smoothed the way out of his Iraq dilemma for Bush. She already helped him a few weeks ago during the EU-USA summit on April 30. There, a general agreement on a new trans-Atlantic economic partnership allowed Bush to present himself as a politician who is moving the revitalization of trans-Atlantic relations forward.

And by accepting the offer Merkel made him in the course of their negotiations in Heiligendamm, Bush has shifted away from his previous rigid oppositional stance on climate change and taken a great step towards a responsible US climate policy.

For the first time, he recognized, as a government leader, that the follow-up agreement to the Kyoto Protocol -- an agreement partly concerned with the further curbing of CO2 emissions -- needs to be reached under the auspices of the United Nations. And along the way, Bush was also able to begin discussing the possible resolution of the dispute over the US's planned missile defense shield with Putin.

But the actual master stroke of Merkel's summit diplomacy consisted in the formulation of the agreement, which spared the US president a commitment to concrete reductions in CO2 emissions, while at the same time persuading all the G-8 countries to endorse an irreversible process to reach a post-Kyoto agreement.

Merkel's method consisted in making all her colleagues participate in this process on the basis of the far-reaching recommendations of the International Panel for Climate Changce (IPCC), the organization created by the UN and charged with investigating the effects of human-induced climate change. Merkel thereby committed all summit participants to a common process towards Kyoto II.

True, Merkel did not succeed in committing her friend George -- or Vladimir, for that matter -- to cutting greenhouse gas emissions exactly by half by the middle of the century. But she is hoping that no one will "escape" such a commitment -- one which barely seemed achievable before the summit -- in the long run.

With the outcome of the summit, she has come a great deal further than most observers had predicted. Characteristically, she took a considerable personal risk: Before the summit, she announced an ambitious climate protection program, thereby raising the political bar very high -- and setting a benchmark by which the possible failure of her efforts would also have been measured.

The fact that she was not able to achieve all of her goals does not detract from her skill in negotiating. Bush will have to remember his commitments when the environment ministers meet in Bali to discuss a follow-up agreement to the Kyoto Protocol at the end of the year.

If Merkel should now also achieve the feat of solving the question of the European constitution at the EU summit in June, she will have achieved more on the international stage in two years than even her most sympathetic observers would have thought possible.

But those who believe the German chancellor's international authority has only to do with her currently being president of the G-8 and EU are mistaken. As German chancellor she embraced her international role more quickly than her predecessors Helmut Kohl and Gerhard Schröder did -- even if the future will increasingly see her having to confront a mood that depicts her international appearances as an escape from the political lowlands of gray domestic politics.

In addition to everything else she has achieved, Merkel has also shown her coalition partner in the German government, the Social Democratic Party (SPD), that she takes the lead in mastering the detail when it comes to decisive issues. All Environmental Minister Sigmar Gabriel, who belongs to the SPD, can do in the face of this is look on in amazement and applaud -- not to mention Merkel's possible challenger, SPD party leader Kurt Beck.