Angela Merkel said this a few months before she became German chancellor. In a July 2005 interview with the Financial Times journalists Bertrand Benoit and Andrew Gowers, she explained her approach to politics in a single sentence: "A good compromise is one where everybody makes a contribution." She went on to add that anyone in politics has to avoid depending on a single interest group, since that dependence is exactly what makes real compromise impossible. At the time, she was a candidate trying to convince voters she could lead a country used to messy, multi-party coalitions rather than clean parliamentary majorities. Sixteen years later, when she stepped down as chancellor in 2021, that line had held up remarkably well as a description of how she actually governed, through four terms, three different coalition partners, and some of the most contentious debates in modern German politics.
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