Lina Lund: Merkel will never bear knytblus

It is a cold novemberdag when Angela Merkel and president of France Emmanuel Macron arrives at the French village of Morhange. Together they honor the millions of people who 100 years earlier had died in the First world war. But when it comes time to greet the audience steal a 101-year-old French woman in the crochet beret show. With fond of my leans, she presented to Merkel and ask if she is the president's wife.

" No, I'm the German chancellor.

" It can't be possible! exclaims the lady in amazement during the meeting, which was captured on film.

when she 2005 took over the management of Europe's heavyweights. She was not only the first woman to ever receive the swear kanslereden, but also the first that has grown up behind the iron curtain.

For many women, became ”Angie” the model that they lacked in the German policy, which even today is dominated by male politicians from the west. Long was she the only färgklicken in a sea of dark suits.

Angela Merkel dodge the continual attempts to make her identity as a woman and east German to something important

But he himself has Merkel always värjt that it would be something special with her gender. Countless times she has delivered a friendly but definite nein on the question whether she calls herself a feminist. While other senior politicians hit the knot on themselves in order to highlight his unique background (as when the us senator Elizabeth Warren sounded a DNA test to prove any family connections with the native americans) dodge, Angela Merkel, the continual attempts to make her identity as a woman and east German to something important.

"I don't have all the time to point out that I come from the east," she says in the interview that the DN in publishing in translation from the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit.

It happens not often that Angela Merkel allows herself to be interviewed, and rarely speaks she's so open and personal in the meeting with the journalist Jana Hensel. Still fighting the writer to get their intervjuperson to come forward as a representative of their own sex, and the east German experience.

in Vain.

" I don't think that women generally admire other women, respond Merkel deterrence.

Angela Merkel, in an unusually open-hearted interview at his office in Berlin, the German chancellery. Photo: Dominik Butzmann/Die Zeit/Laif

However, for Jana Hensel, who, like Merkel, is a woman, and grew up in the East, is chancellor's biography is a stub. In a previous hyllningstext to the chancellor, she writes that ”without Angela Merkel would this country not have been mine. Without her, I would, as a woman, as a German, have not found my place” (Die Zeit no. 45 2018).

She is not alone to feel this way, but there is nothing that the chancellor wants to take credit for.

Angela Merkel is the politician who will never wear knytblus. And it is not primarily about the (lack of?) vanity, but about political beliefs, and strategy.

"I'm not the only women chancellor, but the chancellor, for all the people in Germany," she says in a nyckelformulering.

the land which 30 years ago was divided by the barbed wire seems genuine. But it is also the expression of a political survival strategy in a time when Germany once again holds on to slide apart.

Merkel's mentor, gammelkanslern Helmut Kohl, has passed into history as ”Enandets chancellor”. The question is whether Merkel will be remembered as the most polarizing leader Germany has had in modern times.

No one has been as admired as she is. Few have been as reviled. Both men and women.

Ironically, it is in her old country, Germany, she meets the most opposition

Some hate her clothes, the other her leadership style. A triangulerande teflonkansler without an ideological compass. Some hold her responsible for the rising prices of butter, körförbuden for older diesel cars, all sorts of genusdebatter and – above all – refugees placed in over the borders.

Ironically, it is in her old country, Germany, she meets the most opposition. It is on east German streets and squares which visselpipekonserterna and the slogan, ”Merkel will have to remove the" and ”folkförrädare” echoing the very highest, and no one else reaches the right-wing party Alternative for Germany (AFD) greater success.

In their eyes, it provides no plus points to be a woman or ossie.

30 years after the fall of the berlin wall, the memories of mass unemployment and the still unhealed wounds after the reunion, come to the surface. Even Merkel, who previously reluctantly done a number of his east German background, is talking increasingly about their experiences from a country that no longer exists.

Now expresses herself gently when she says that the reunion was more difficult for many other than what it was for her.

– I quickly found a new job, had many opportunities and was able to broaden my horizon.

Three decades later, is Angela Merkel, the unique in German politics.

No wonder, then, that the 101-year-old frenchwoman in the crochet beret did not believe her eyes when she realized it was not the president of the Macrons wife she shook hands with.

But the world's most powerful woman.