We Are Chancelloress! One Angie does not collapse the male bastion - but she has opened the gate
1 A strange atmosphere was in the air during the weeks before and after the election. For a long time, no election campaign had agitated people that much. This extreme polarisation certainly was not caused by the two big parties: for the one candidate was the incumbent SPD-chancellor, who in office had distinguished himself as "comrade of the bosses"; the other candidate was a christian democrat, who had almost exclusively courted economic leaders in her election campaign. So, something else must have been behind the voters' surprising return to an outmoded polarised thinking - for reality is more flexible.
2 This also became obvious in the coalition talks, during which both parties hastily jettisoned positions which had been declared inalienable during the campaign, and in which the male negotiators get along splendidly. Thus, even before the first meeting, the Westphalian participant gave his Bavarian colleague a birthday present: a CD "with the best football broadcasts." And after the second top-level talk, Stoiber chatted with journalists about what they - "Müntefering and I" - aspire to together. And? Oh yes, there was still someone else. "And particularly Frau Merkel." She is part of it now. But she remains the particular. The stranger. In her case, the double stranger: a woman and an "Ossi."
3 Thirty years after women had rattled again at the male fortress, one of them saw the key and simply took it. And now she opens the door to the fortress. Legally entitled, and entirely on her own.
4 Merkel didn't seem to be aware of the outrageous nature of her endeavour until after the election. This precisely allowed her to start moving - and to benumb the preservers of the status quo. This one is harmless. She isn't one of those. We know how to handle her.
5 Thus, Angela Merkel of all people became a Trojan horse that didn't gallop into the bastion, but show-jumped across the course. Only during the blood-thirsty election night things began to dawn on her: when the loser tried to brush off the winner, and when, a few days later, her own men began to dismount their chancelloress even before she moved into the chancellor's office (remember the fight for the chancellor's policy-making power).