Angela Merkel has made it clear that she will step down after Germany’s next general election in the fall of 2021. By then she will draw level with Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s 16-year reign, who entered the history books for paving the way to German reunification. Merkel wants to leave behind an equally impressive achievement in Germany’s relationship with China, which she has visited an unprecedented 12 times during her chancellorship—but the odds, and the actions of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), are against her.
It has been widely reported that Merkel wanted to leave the political scene with a landmark European Union-China summit in Leipzig, where she had studied physics at the then-named Karl Marx University in the mid-1970s. Merkel had pinned her hopes on signing a historic investment treaty that would level the field for European business in China. It wasn’t meant to be. As a result of COVID-19, the gathering was reduced to a one-day virtual summit.
