Europe of Mark Rutte and Angela Merkel

Mark Rutte and Angela Merkel have been the two European politicians in the past who stayed in office the longest, as they have spent more than a decade in government. They are next to each other in the famous photo of the Nord Stream opening ceremony on November 8, 2011. However, they represent two ideas and two periods of Europe.

The idea of Europe that Rutte offers us is contained in a speech delivered at the Carnegie Europe thinktank in Brussels: Europe must get into a wartime mindset to stop the Russians at all costs! Therefore, defense spending needs to be increased, aiming for a threshold of 3% of GDP. In 2023, Germany spent 2% of GDP on defense for the first time, United Kingdom 2.3%, Italy 1.5%, Spain 1.3%, the USA 3.4%. The Financial Times is accustomed to respecting numbers and, in a full-page headline, remarked to Rutte that reaching 3% would be extremely difficult for many European countries already facing inflation, layoffs, protests, strikes, and labor crises. Starting with France and Germany: Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz are two of Europe’s most unpopular leaders. Outside Europe, Keir Starmer warned: in the dire situation I’m in, I can allocate a maximum of 2.3% to 2.5%.

No one has questioned Rutte’s forecasting and management abilities, which are widely discussed in the Netherlands, and his lying skills are not questioned either. During his years of rule, Erasmus’s country has turned into Eldorado of cocaine, mafia, and reaction. A small group of young drug traffickers out of nowhere turned into the dreaded Mocro Mafia. Tons of cocaine and hundreds of millions of euros passed unimpeded through Dutch ports, banks, and roads. From observers like Roberto Saviano to politicians like Edi Rama, experts emphasize the partial transformation of the Netherlands into “a narco-state… one of the most criminal countries in the world.” And indeed, there have been bombs, intimidation, violence of all kinds, from the murder of Peter de Vries to a burning truck crashing into the Telegraaf newsroom.

This striking transformation took place during the presidency of Mark Rutte, known for many other situations of failed governance, culminating in his expulsion from government, which received popular acclaim, following the scandal with thousands of families ruined because they were accused of stealing family allowances and forced to return the money they received in full compliance with the rules. The authorities forcibly took substantial sums from the pockets of the poor, only to discover long afterward that the debt collectors had simply made a mistake in their calculations! Meanwhile, many lost their homes or jobs, some were sheltering under bridges, and others committed suicide. While he was being duped by drug dealers, Rutte was blustering to poor innocent people. Perhaps when he speaks of a “wartime mentality,” is Rutte referring to handling in this way the budget and public order issues that have resulted from his ultra-militant standpoint? Does anyone remember that Rutte, in a masterpiece of a statesman, left his country in the hands of former head of the secret services and right-wing movement Geert Wilders? Will we have a problem with neo-fascism in Europe because Mark Rutte has once again been wrong in his calculations? Which ones of his faults made him head of NATO?

It is a completely different story with Angela Merkel, who the know-it-alls would now like to describe in reverse: not for what she did, but for what she should have done if she had omniscience and omnipotence from the Lord God. Faced with leaders like Rutte telling us to arm up and go, Merkel’s Europe seems to be the Europe of happy years and reminds of Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand’s famous phrase (“Whoever did not live in the years neighboring 1789 does not know what the pleasure of living means”), which was then, regarding other disasters in Europe, often repeated and updated – notably by Stefan Zweig in The World of Yesterday. Memories of a European, published posthumously, after his “standing” suicide in 1942.

There are people who can make history, as well as write it – like Julius Caesar or Winston Churchill. And there are half good ones; Karl Marx wrote a lot about capital, but barely made ends meet, often in debt and at other people’s expense. Niccolo Machiavelli was a distinguished historian and a frustrated diplomat. You can’t have everything in life. For some, Angela Merkel belongs in the worst category: she has managed our history badly and has written it even worse. It is primarily the compatriots who complain about it. Too stingy toward the Greeks, too generous toward the Syrians, too timid toward Vladimir Putin, too harsh toward Helmut Kohl, she can come across as an unstable person who has never gotten it right. However, we are talking about a vision that has been widely shared; Martin Schultz: “On Russia, we were all in agreement.”

They say her policy is over and buried, like the Nord Stream 2, which was its symbol and is now an empty and rusty pipe in the abyss of the sea. Those who criticize her are more or less conscious accomplices of those who deliberately sunk this pipe and this policy.

Angela Merkel is on tour to launch her autobiography and sometimes seems shipwrecked, clinging to her reputation in inclement weather. She struggles to explain, justify, rewrite, and renew her life. Her autobiography is called Freedom, but according to Gideon Rahman, she could have called it No Regrets.

It is well known that no one can judge themselves well and that self-awareness requires a trusted psychiatrist. Will the story tell the truth? Unfortunately, it often does so in its own way and with some peculiarities that should not be underestimated. Julius Caesar wrote Commentaries on the Gallic War very well, but Asterix looks at it differently; Winston Churchill wrote The Second World War very well, but there are still people in Dresden who don’t see it the same way. In addition to wars, culture also suffers its own delays: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died in poverty, Vincent van Gogh never sold a single painting, and Gregor Mendel lived as a loser. Sometimes fate attacks the same person as if it wants to take away what it has given him. Mozart is not only in the category of those who died poor, but also in the category of those who died early: at the age of 35, in the company of others like Georges Bizet at 36; Felix Mendelssohn at 38; Frideric Chopin at 39, Vincenzo Bellini at 33, but as soon as Olga Peretyatko opens her mouth, he is completely alive – like others of his peers who have given meaning and significance to an otherwise drearily silent and empty universe.

They say that everyone can hope to enter the category of “world-historical figures” for at least fifteen minutes; but there is not always someone like Georg W. Friedrich Hegel who can explain to you why you are as lucky as Napoleon was on October 16, 1806, after the destruction of Friedrich’s Prussia at the Battle of Jena. Having a sense of history doesn’t mean losing a sense of your own microscopic significance. Out of modesty, or calculation, or conviction, Angela Merkel ignores the historical meaning of her governments and allows it to remain suspended between the deep condition of a rusty pipe at the bottom of the Baltic Sea and the starry skies of the best European culture, which, yes, is a culture of freedom and therefore of tolerance, coexistence, compromise, dialog, and peace in general: the exact opposite of the “wartime mentality.”

Angela Merkel told her story in a minimalist way, as if it were news, very worried about her interlocutors and the consequences. But when the dust of time mercifully covers us all, History will probably be more favorable to her than to her contemporaries. Her years will be remembered with words similar to those of Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand after 1789 and Stefan Zweig in 1942: those who think like Mark Rutte are preparing a Europe of iron and blood, debt and adventure.