ngela Merkel couldn't have remained Germany's chancellor forever. Even Helmut Kohl, who was chairman of the Christian Democratic Union and Germany's longest-serving postwar chancellor, had to step down after 16 years. Kohl's tenure ended in the usual way: In 1998, with unemployment and economic dissatisfaction rising, voters chose the left-of-center Gerhard Schröder over the right-of-center Kohl. But today, unemployment is at an almost historic low of 3.4 percent. Both youth unemployment and long-term unemployment, typical drivers of the anti-incumbent spirit, are low (though so is annual growth, at 2 percent).
Yet Merkel announced this week that she is stepping down as party chair, which strongly suggests she will not serve out the remainder of her term. She has been done in, above all, by the refugee crisis, for which a growing number of German voters have blamed her ever since she famously told them, in the late summer of 2015, “Wir schaffen das”(“We can do this”). Many of those voters want to reclaim what they have suddenly come to regard as an endangered identity.
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