ABSTRACT
In December 2015, Time chose German Chancellor Angela Merkel as its person of the year, calling her ‘Chancellor of the Free World’. 1 A month earlier, The Economist had named her ‘the indispensable European’. 2 The tendency to project outsized expectations onto the individual reflects a wider phenomenon: German economic and political power in Europe has grown, partly because Germany weathered the 2008 economic crisis relatively well, and partly because of the lethargy of other European powers, including France and the United Kingdom.
