German Chancellor Angela Merkel understands the challenges for the EU are of a more existential nature than those facing China, the United States or any other single country.
Those who know Chancellor Angela Merkel best say that what drives the uncharacteristic urgency and decisiveness of her messages is a fear that the EU could become irrelevant or even unravel from the force of Covid-19.
Yet the 27 EU members confront more fundamental questions as their citizens weigh the value EU membership has brought them in the crisis. For Angela Merkel, who held the rotating EU presidency once before in 2007, it's a last shot at historic legacy. Can Germany's first and only woman chancellor, who has recharged her waning standing during the coronavirus, demonstrate the leadership required to unify and shape Europe that her critics say eluded her during almost 15 years in power.
It will be a test of her leadership, beside French leader Emmanuel Macron and other EU leaders, whether she can convert a group of skeptics known as "the frugal four" – Austria, Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden -- who have resisted the scale and makeup of the $850 billion recovery plan. Chancellor Merkel's friends privately share that she believes it is President Trump's spite, more than anything else, that lay behind the timing and nature of his troop withdrawal announcement, following her decision not to physically attend a G-7 meeting that the president had hoped to schedule in Washington this month.
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