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15 - “Mama Merkel” and “Mutti-Multikulti”: The Perils of Governing While Female

from Part III - Women and Political Power in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2019

Patricia Anne Simpson
Affiliation:
University of Nebraska–Lincoln.
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Summary

THE SEISMIC IMPACT of Western election cycles in 2016 fractured the image of women as world leaders and citizens. The US presidential race morphed into a face-off between liberal and conservative ideologies that succeeded in polarizing oppositional politics and dividing the nation along attributes of intersectional identities, not least gender lines. While the 2017 federal elections in the Federal Republic of Germany confirmed Chancellor Angela Merkel for another term at the helm of the most powerful country in the European Union (EU), she has faced significant challenges in building the coalition necessary for effective national and transnational leadership. Tepid endorsements of the election results proclaimed it “inconclusive,” and the media rapidly turned the EU spotlight on Emmanuel Macron, “France's energetic young president.” With successful elections seemingly transcending race and gender differences, many were quick to proclaim that ours is a post-racial, post-gender, and post-national world. Yet the election results of 2016 and subsequent surges in gender-specific protest, against systemic sexual harassment, for example, point to the persistence of patriarchal structures in personal and professional realms. Contemporary democracies are undergoing a radical shift in the negotiation of gender politics that empower a largely white male demographic to repossess power, privilege, and entitlement allegedly disrupted by the rise of “political correctness” and images of gendered and racialized otherness. In this essay I examine the contrasting and often contradictory projections of female leadership and the escalation of critical rhetoric through a series of allegories generated by far-right antifeminism and the critique of Merkel as a failed and multicultural mother. In other words, I inventory the perils of governing while female through an analysis of select texts and images, including the portrayal of Merkel as “Frau Europa”; the “enigmatic,” mysterious, and inscrutable Mona Lisa of the European Union; the gender-neutral portrayals that acknowledge her power and rationality; and the maternalizing depictions of her as “Mama Merkel” and “Mutti-Multikulti” in response to her handling of the refugee crisis.

Merkel herself is the subject of continued scholarly and popular analysis. Political scientists, cultural critics, and comparative gender-studies scholars focused attention on her leadership style, her memory politics, and her policies.

Type
Chapter
Information
Realities and Fantasies of German Female Leadership
From Maria Antonia of Saxony to Angela Merkel
, pp. 301 - 317
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2019

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