THE ANTI-AUTHORITARIAN:

It fitted into this picture that news weekly Der Spiegel revealed in 2014 that Merkel's government was far more heavily influenced by opinion polls than previously known. Following a freedom of information request by a young Green MP, Malte Spitz, it emerged that on average, the chancellor was commissioning three surveys per week to test how the German people felt about all sorts of things. Pollsters are sceptical about the newsworthiness of this revelation: Schröder too had a close relationship with them, and the budget of the federal press agency, which carries out these polls, had not suddenly increased.

What is fascinating, however, is the extent to which Merkel's spokespeople often worked with the exact terminology used in these surveys, and just how closely in keeping her policy decisions have been with their findings. In fact, they show the two big decisions that look likely to define the Merkel era--her announcement in May 2011 that Germany would close all its nuclear power stations by December 2022, and the decision in 2015 to allow in nearly a million refugees and migrants as part of what she christened a "culture of welcoming"--were entirely in keeping with the public mood at the time.

With her decision on the Energiewende, the "turn" against nuclear energy, Merkel U-turned on her government's decision to keep nuclear power stations open for longer--but she did so knowing that, after Japan's Fukushima accident, 58 per cent of voters were in favour of a phase-out, and furthermore that renewable energies were overwhelmingly popular.

And when thousands of Syrians marched towards Germany from Orbán's Hungary in September 2015, her leadership was hailed by liberals around the world as not only visionary but decidedly courageous. Yet a glance at a government poll a few months before prefigured exactly which way she would lean: only 17 per cent of Germans wanted the government to do less to help these people, 79 per cent thought it should stick to its course or do more.

For much of Merkel's reign, her idea of leadership was perfectly matched for a country that felt it deserved a holiday from the grand historical dramas that had played out so ruinously on its soil in both the first and the second half of the 20th century. Government by polling and focus groups has a bad reputation, but German history is full of bad leaders who were led by a gut feeling about what "the Germans" really wanted. And in Merkel's case there is a sense this has been an accumulative process, driven by a belief in the existence of stable moral laws, rather than a fluid sea of emotions and opinions.

At its best Merkel's mix of hesitancy in personal opinion and pro-active research into everyone else's meant she allowed the country to change and evolve, even if at times these changes went against her more conservative instincts. The ultimate example of this came in June 2017, when the Bundestag voted to legalise same-sex marriage. Germany was one of the last countries in Europe to do so, mainly because Merkel's CDU had spent years blocking opportunities to expand LGBT rights.

When the change inevitably came, Merkel was--to use a chemist's term--the catalyst. That summer, she said at a panel discussion that she was aggrieved that the debate on the subject had been mainly carried out along party lines; she now hoped it would be "headed towards a conscience vote." The ballot in parliament ended with 393 to 226 votes in favour of legalisation, including 75 votes in favour from previously silenced liberal delegates in the CDU. Merkel voted with her conscience too: against the motion. It was the finest moment of her own interpretation of leadership as an exercise in ego suppression, and yet another reminder of the extent to which her inner moral and intellectual universe has been kept under lock through her tenure.

One of the ironies of the Merkel era is that while few politicians in the world talk more about global challenges and the need for nations to rally together to meet them, her own style of leadership isn't well suited to this task. As global crises have come knocking on Germany's doors with increasing urgency, the less appealing aspects of Merkel's Arthur Dent-ism have become harder to ignore.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is ultimately the story of a man who discovers that democracy in the most scientifically advanced corners of the universe is as depressing and inefficient a business as it was in his own corner of now pulverised Little England. There are far-flung planets whose populations regularly vote to be governed by lizards, even though they hate the lizards. The much-coveted post of President of the Galaxy is a pointless one, filled by egomaniacs and sociopaths like the positively Trump-esque Zaphod Beeblebrox.

"It is a well-known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it," Adams writes in his sequel, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. There have always been signs that Merkel is as defeatist about the possibility of global leadership as Adams. The notion that a politician could use a speech to project their norms of what is right and wrong out into the world has always struck her as naively utopian, or, as she told Der Spiegel in 2016, "the idea that a person can touch other people so much with words that they change their minds is not one I have ever shared--but it's a beautiful idea nonetheless."

After Barack Obama gave his famous Cairo speech in 2009, calling for a "new beginning" for relations between the US and the Middle East and intoning that "America is not and never will be at war with Islam," Merkel waved off the American president's rhetorical grandeur in front of a group of journalists, adding, according to one reporter present, "Oh, he's only talking."

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