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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.