Word: merkel
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Germany itself is facing a tremendous slowdown. The government now predicts that its economy will contract by 6% this year, much more than the economies of the U.S. or Britain, and on a par with the baleful prospect for that other exporting powerhouse, Japan. The government of Chancellor Angela Merkel is pumping $108 billion into the economy, but after an intense debate it has resisted international pressure to do more, saying it wanted to evaluate existing plans before adding new ones. But it isn't just officials in Berlin who might spend time in Halle seeing what an injection...
German skepticism about the utility of big government-spending programs endures, bolstering Merkel's determination to resist international pressure to take more decisive action to counter the economic crisis. Among those arguing forcefully against any new stimulus packages is the Taxpayers' Federation. Holznagel says that in the early 1990s his organization kept to itself doubts about the big spending on reunification - it was politically foolish to do otherwise. But now, he says, "the situation is completely different. The danger is always that money is spent neither appropriately nor efficiently...
Then an unlikely figure entered the fray: Angela Merkel. German Chancellors don't usually weigh in on church matters, she said. But when the Vatican gave "the impression that it could be possible to deny that the Holocaust happened," she felt compelled to demand that the Pope repudiate the idea, lest it affect relations with "the Jewish people as a whole." In essence, Merkel (a Protestant) was tutoring the German Pope on his responsibilities to the Jews...
Most troubling of all was Benedict's reinstatement of Williamson, a debacle whose full scope the Vatican seemed to recognize only the day after Merkel's upbraiding. The church demanded that Williamson recant his gas-chamber denial, and the Pontiff released a letter that deplored the strain between the church and the Jews resulting from his "mistake." He assured a visiting group of Israeli rabbis of his intent to deepen Catholic-Jewish relations and his belief that the Jewish people "were chosen as the elected people" to communicate fidelity...
There are several good reasons. For one, as Merkel made clear, Germans have a special obligation. "We don't want [history] to repeat itself," as papal adviser Kasper says. The Holocaust also remains an affront to the self-understanding of Christians, and Western civilization as a whole. We learned the word genocide through the Jews. Since Vatican II, the Roman Catholic Church has set the post-Shoah standard in acknowledging the absolute unacceptability of the Jewish loss. Without the Catholic Church's leadership on the issue, other Christian groups might not have followed...