The legacy of Angela Merkel

German leader Angela Merkel is leaving office to spend more time with her family after 16 years at the helm. But what has she got to show for it?

MoneyWeek magazine cover illustration - Angela Merkel
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How will she be remembered?

For all the justified criticism of Angela Merkel’s tenure as chancellor – that she is a master of getting through crises without ever quite resolving them – she will be remembered chiefly as a steadying influence in an age of turbulence. There is a reason, says Oliver Moody in The Sunday Times, why Merkel leaves office with a sky-high approval rating of “an almost hagiographic 64%”. That is the sense of authentic, calm reassurance and solidity that she embodies and projects.

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Simon Wilson’s first career was in book publishing, as an economics editor at Routledge, and as a publisher of non-fiction at Random House, specialising in popular business and management books. While there, he published Customers.com, a bestselling classic of the early days of e-commerce, and The Money or Your Life: Reuniting Work and Joy, an inspirational book that helped inspire its publisher towards a post-corporate, portfolio life.   

Since 2001, he has been a writer for MoneyWeek, a financial copywriter, and a long-time contributing editor at The Week. Simon also works as an actor and corporate trainer; current and past clients include investment banks, the Bank of England, the UK government, several Magic Circle law firms and all of the Big Four accountancy firms. He has a degree in languages (German and Spanish) and social and political sciences from the University of Cambridge.