Macron, coming to power in 2017, made restoring parity across the Rhine the raison d’être of his presidency. And during the 2015 refugee and migrant crisis, she upended the bloc’s asylum policy with a few words to her fellow German citizens - “We can do it.” (When she retreated from that judgment a few months later, she negotiated an agreement for the whole European Union with Turkey, aided by only the Dutch prime minister, whose country happened to hold the rotating E.U.

In 2014, she pushed a divided European Union into agreeing on collective sanctions against Russia over the annexation of Crimea. Draghi’s announcement of an asset-purchasing program, easing the eurozone’s borrowing costs. Merkel became the central player in all the big questions Europe faced. Sarkozy’s departure in 2012, any notion of Franco-German parity vanished. Merkel’s intervention that proved decisive. Although they both pushed for the removal from office of Italy’s prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, it was Ms. Sarkozy was more ornament than decision maker. In the early stages of the crisis she appeared to be just one half of a double act - referred to as “Merkozy” - with Nicolas Sarkozy, then president of France. It wasn’t until the eurozone crisis, which began in 2010 and sent borrowing costs soaring across the bloc, that Ms. Merkel’s leadership was more short-lived than many realize. Though she became chancellor in 2005, Ms. There is a vacuum at the heart of the bloc for a simple reason: The European Union cannot now be led. In fact, her old job hasn’t really existed for a while. Hamstrung by the rivalry between America and China, and deeply divided internally, the European Union inhabits a world different from that of the years of Ms. And perhaps at the back is Prime Minister Mario Draghi of Italy, the former president of the European Central Bank credited with saving the euro. Then there’s Olaf Scholz, likely to be Germany’s next chancellor, who will hope to inherit Ms.

Leading the charge is President Emmanuel Macron of France, whose self-proclaimed attempts to give the European Union an explicitly political purpose have been frustrated so far. Now, as she prepares to leave office, a competition to succeed her is underway. Leaders - among them Helmut Schmidt and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand - would sort out their disagreements first and then Europeanize their compromises.īut for most of the past decade, one leader has presided over Europe alone: Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany. For a long time, France and Germany, the two largest founding members, managed it relatively collaboratively. LONDON - Leading the European Union and its predecessor organizations has always been a difficult task.

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