Angela Merkel is About to Pay for All Her Blunders

My German-born friend Peter Thiel — the world’s most successful contrarian — has a favorite interview question. “What important truth,” he asks tech wannabes, “do very few people agree with you on?”

The important truth about which very few people agree with me is that Angela Merkel has been a political disaster. The German chancellor has long been the darling of the pro-European media. In November 2015, The Economist called her “the indispensable European.” A month later, the Financial Times named her its “person of the year.” Time magazine proclaimed her “chancellor of the free world.”

These were extraordinary misjudgments. For the plaudits were raining down on a woman who had, just months before, made the single biggest error in the history of the postwar German republic.

On German television in July 2015, Merkel had reduced a young Palestinian refugee to tears by explaining that her family might have to face deportation. “There are thousands and thousands of people in Palestinian refugee camps,” the chancellor explained. “If we now say, ‘You can all come’ . . . . we just cannot manage that.” The waterworks worked. Six weeks later, Merkel had opened the gates of Germany and declared: “We can manage that.”

All kinds of historical explanations have been offered for Merkel’s epoch-making change of mind, including her East German upbringing and her clergyman father. Who knows? Faced with Reem Sahwil’s tears, the chancellor’s reaction was an impulsive attempt to comfort her, followed by a massive, unilateral U-turn, which she later had to reverse. Here was one of those rarities in politics: a full 360-degree pirouette.