Winning by Spending Leadership Capital? Angela Merkel’s Approach to the Refugee and COVID-19 Crises

During the past crisis-ridden decade, one political leader was there to guide the European Union through it all: German Chancellor Angela Merkel. In the multilevel EU system, national leaders are responsible for the welfare of their national constituents but also provide pan-European leadership. This makes balancing key political values like legitimacy, sovereignty, and solidarity a challenging task. This raises the question of what constitutes successful leadership in the context of transnational EU crises and to what extent EU crisis management affects national leaders’ political fate. Merkel’s 16 years in office provides an excellent case through which to explore these questions. A previous study shows that the chancellor upheld a steady and strong level of leadership capital during her first ten years in office, despite the outbreak of the eurozone crisis. This led some to hypothesize that this was due to Merkel’s tendency to lead from behind and not to spend political capital. In this chapter, we put this hypothesis to the test. Using the framework of the Leadership Capital Index, we explore how Chancellor Merkel managed the European Refugee and COVID-19 crises and to what extent this affected her leadership capital. We find that, in both crises, Merkel did lead from the front and spend considerable political capital. However, while with the refugee crisis this caused a significant and long-term depletion of her capital, with the COVID-19 crisis the expenditure of capital seems only to have fostered an unprecedented increase in her leadership capital.