Issue Briefs

The 3M’s: Merkel, Macron and May – Europe’s Three Loser Leaders

The 3M’s: Merkel, Macron and May – Europe’s Three Loser Leaders

Martin Sieff

March 1, 2019

Just as “The Book of Revelation” warns against the coming of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the three main countries of Western Europe are being led into their greatest crises since World War II by The Three M’s – Angela Merkel of Germany, Emmanuel Macron of France, and Theresa May of the United Kingdom.

It is no coincidence that two of these leaders – Macron and May – have proven to be irresponsible and possibly even hysterical demagogues, seeking to provoke needless crises throughout the world at the drop of a hat.

Botched immigration policy in Germany

Merkel was acclaimed for most of the past 14 years as the First Stateswoman of Europe. In reality however, her hapless economic policies at home have done more harm to the German economy than anything has in the entire history of the Federal Republic. She unwisely threw open the doors of Germany and Europe to an enormous wave of Middle East immigrants, in numbers way beyond current absorptive capacity. In so doing she has torn the nations of the European Union apart and set them against each other.

Mrs May’s continued failures to show any skill or competence whatsoever in the existential crisis of Brexit have elicited fear and amazement in every other European capital.

The reality is now awfully unavoidably clear to the 200 million people living in all three countries. All of their leaders are inept, fearful nonentities who either brought the disasters on themselves or – in the case of May – have not shown the slightest clue about how to avert them.

Merkel is the only one of the three who had the experience and in theory the political stature to avoid the crises. For this very reason, her culpability is therefore the greatest of them all.

Merkel has served as federal chancellor of Germany for 14 years. In this capacity, she was the leading architect and champion of the economic policies that have impoverished the rest for Europe for Germany’s selfish benefit through all that time. And it was she who made the fateful decision to throw open her country’s borders to millions of undocumented and unregulated refugees – the innocent and the violent, the helpless and the predators, from Syria’s civil war.

Before that it was her own cowardly failure to protest or attempt to block the US, UK and French interventions to destabilize and destroy Syria that cost 600,000 lives and triggered the outflow of millions of refugees in the first place.

Thanks to Merkel, Germany, one of the safest, most prosperous, stable and pleasant countries in the world to live in, has become rather dangerous, its politics are radicalizing and its public security has been compromised. And it was all her fault.

Macron’s blunders

It took 14 years for Merkel to seriously damage her country. Macron, the youngest French leader since Louis Napoleon (nephew of the more famous one) 170 years ago, managed to do so in only two years.

Acclaimed by the liberal media throughout the West, Macron’s arrogance and contemptable lack of any compassion or feelings of social justice for his own people was evident from the beginning.

He inherited a flat economy with historically high real unemployment levels from his clueless predecessor, Francois Hollande, and immediately went to work slashing what remained of social services and welfare payments to those who needed them most, while seeming to lecture France’s long-suffering people that it was their own fault.

Typically, he uncritically supported policies inflicting wars and ruin on other nations around the world, and he lectured other nations about their alleged lack of democracy when his own failure to address any of the prime domestic crises afflicting the French people made a mockery of his own political qualifications.

Hapless May

May arguably is the least responsible of the three for the mess she is in, but that certainly does not absolve her. May did not create the ridiculous and endless Brexit crisis that is now inexorably and relentlessly destroying forever the 400 year edifice of the United Kingdom (going back to when James VI of Scotland unified both crowns and governments as James I of England in 1603). She inherited that shambles from her predecessor, the hapless bungler and political gambler David Cameron.

But in her seemingly endless two and half years in office, May has become a figure of global ridicule and contempt as she staggers from one inept political bungle to another. She called an unnecessary election that she bungled embarrassingly. She brought her most dangerous and irresponsible rival, Boris Johnson, into her government as her right hand man so that he could endlessly conspire against her from within and stab her in the back. She was forced to accept humiliating terms of divorce from the European Union. Now she is despised and rejected by despairing “Remainers” and crazed “Brexiteers” alike.

May manifestly lacks the political stature, courage and simple capability to rise up and impose her will on the crisis almost disintegrating her country. Compared to her, Neville Chamberlain, the despised prime minister who led Britain to the brink of annihilation at the beginning of World War II, was commanding and competent.

Sadly, the Three M’s – Merkel, Macron and May – will hang on to power and continue to harm their own countries as long as they can. And they will continue to blame other nations, their own people and every other scapegoat they can think of for their own almost criminal incompetence. Because, as the Book of Proverbs in the Bible rightly points out, fools like them can never learn.

 

Martin Sieff is a Global Policy Institute Fellow. He is author most recently of Gathering Storm: The Seventh Era of American History and the Coming Crises That Will Lead to It.

 

The views and opinions expressed in this issue brief are those of the author.