The full impact of Merkel's actions, especially encouraging the huge influx of people in 2015, will take time to play out. The closing of the nuclear power stations, some of which are quite new, has forced Germany to revert to burning lignite coal and increased its dependance on Russian gas.
And what about Merkel's effect on German politics more generally, with the steady weakening of the CDU-CSU suffering its worst ever result (24 percent of the national vote) in 2021.
Her decision to close down Germany’s nuclear power program—again, a decision she took “almost alone”—has led not only to Germany having the highest energy prices in Europe but also to its continued reliance on coal to handle the “intermittency” problem of renewables.
She prevented reform of the euro in the 2015 Greek crisis, trapping Greece in a debtor’s prison and inflicting stagnation, high youth unemployment and emigration on Mediterranean Europe.
Her promotion of the undersea Nordstream pipelines 1 and 2, against the objections of Washington and Brussels, increased Germany’s and Europe’s over-reliance on Russian energy while enabling Putin to use energy pricing and supplies as weapons against Poland and Ukraine.
Her 2008 veto of George Bush’s proposal to invite Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO effectively invited Putin to invade both countries, which he promptly did—a result hardly redeemed by what the Economist regards as her standing up to Putin by imposing sanctions on Russia.
Her most negative triumph, however, is the extraordinary fact that although she won five elections in a row, she progressively weakened her own Christian Democrat Party in Germany and its party group, the European People’s Party, in the European Parliament.