Angela Merkel’s journey to conviction leadership during COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Angela Merkel has been Germany’s leader, the locomotive of the European Union, for 16 years. Cultivating a particular style, with a low profile, she was the first female chancellor in the Germanic country. Navigating tensions within her own party, the political rivals that pushed her to reach agreements on the limits and the difficult understanding with other colleagues from states such as Macron, Trump or Putin, she has been avoiding the different crises that have come to the fore. However, the crisis unleashed by the arrival of COVID-19 was different from the previous ones. She is always questioned, in the same way as the rest of the women in key positions, because the leadership traits that are required of leaders are related to those identified with masculinity. However, in managing the pandemic, Merkel was highly valued for exercising another type of profile, as an understanding, kind and fraternal mutti (‘mother’, in German). This article analyses the transition from a ‘masculinized’ leadership of the Teutonic chancellor, in the first stage prior to the pandemic, to the one ‘of convictions’. While at the beginning, she was seen as a transgressor for going beyond the expected gender stereotypes, in the second, she gave way to another feminine in managing the crisis provoked by the explosion of the pandemic. Instead of a warmongering and rational speech, Merkel resorted to a rather emotional and feminine one.