What does Angela Merkel do now that she is not chancellor?

Work was not going to be missing Angela Merkel once he left the chancellery of Germany. What was not clear at first is whether she would be willing to return to the ring or she would prefer to enjoy, at 67 years of age, less stressful days. The UN has already offered her a position and even The Left, a party that did not exactly agree with the former foreign minister, asked her to return to the political scene to mediate in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

Before leaving her position in Berlin, Merkel confessed that she would use her free time to rest and sleep until a little later. It was not much of a challenge considering that, they say, she slept just four hours a day in her role as head of government. Since leaving office, she has been rarely seen in public. She sometimes goes shopping and in December she was seen at the Deutsches Theater for the premiere of Heinrich von Kleist’s “The Broken Pitcher”.

His most media appearance so far occurred on February 13, when she attended, in her capacity as delegate of her party for Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the act of assumption of the second period of Frank-Walter Steinmeier as President of Germany. On that occasion, numerous politicians from all sectors took selfies with the former foreign minister and shared the images on social networks.

It has also been said that he will start working on his memoirs together with Beate Baumann, one of his trusted people. He has also been seen regularly in his new office, the same one Helmut Kohl used as a former chancellor and which is located in a building that houses members of the German Parliament. Merkel arrives at the scene, tidies up her office (in which she has nine collaborators) and appears to be very busy, in full control of her schedule, according to those who have met her.

Job vacancies

The most concrete job offer was made by the UN Secretary General, António Guterres, who offered him to take charge of a high-level advisory body on global public goods. The proposal was personally rejected by the former foreign minister, who called Guterres to thank him for his consideration, but declined the offer. Had he accepted, he would have had to move to New York. The truth is that it was unlikely that Merkel would accept, since her husband, Joachim Sauer, has a current contract with a Berlin university, to which he added another with the University of Turin, in Italy, to teach chemistry . And one of Merkel’s goals on her break was to spend more time with Sauer.

In any case, if Merkel gets bored and her body asks her to return to the political arena, the leader of the parliamentary faction of the German Left, Dietmar Bartsch, put on the table the name of the former foreign minister as a mediator in the Ukraine conflict. “She has the necessary authority before both parties in conflict to defuse the situation,” Bartsch told the Funke group newspapers. Given that the current government lacks sufficient legitimacy, since it was Merkel who participated in the Minsk agreements in 2015 that laid the groundwork for the truce in eastern Ukraine, the leftist politician thinks that Chancellor Olaf Scholz and his team they would do well to “work together with France to propose Merkel as a peace mediator between Russia and Ukraine.”

During one of her last trips to the United States, Merkel was asked about her future. She then she replied that the new stage “I think I will like it a lot”, and maintained that she would use the time to “read something, and then my eyes will close because I am tired, then I will sleep a little and in the end we will see where I appear”. Regardless of what Merkel decides or where she appears, the one thing that is certain is that she will never have to worry about pesky financial matters. According to DW estimates, the chancellor will receive a pension of 15,000 euros per month thanks to her work as chancellor and parliamentarian, as well as minister in previous periods. (I)