The Eurocrisis is one of the most severe crises in the history of the European Union. As the crisis unfolded, European leaders were torn between the pressures of capital markets and demands for centralization, and the need to keep their domestic political constituencies on board. Few managed this balancing act successfully: Of the 17 Eurozone leaders, 13 were ousted out of government early or did not survive the next elections.
Of the four leaders that survived the crisis, the case of the German Chancellor is especially interesting. Merkel is generally not perceived as charismatic and her approach to the crisis was criticized heavily in foreign media but she maintained high domestic popularity. Dubbed as the ‘mummy’ of all Germans, her cautious ‘naïve scientist’ approach and policy-positions regarding the Eurocrisis seemed to fit the German economic and political cultural identity seamlessly. This raises the question whether Merkel derived part of her leadership capital from cultural identification amongst her and her constituency. Such cultural identification effects relate to the second of the three constituent parts of the LCI as outlined by the conveners of the panel: A leader’s relational capital and the power in their capacity to be perceived as ‘one of us’.
This paper explores how such ability to speak ‘for the group and clarifying what forms of action best accord with shared collective understandings and interests’ (Reicher 2014) relates to leadership capital. It will analyse to what extent Eurocrisis sense making by two successful (Merkel, Faymann) and two failed European leaders (Sarkozy, Cowen) reflect their national cultural dimensions as established by Hofstede and GLOBE. It will relate these similarity-rates to two LCI indicators applicable to EU policymaking: the levels of public trust in leaders EU policies (R1-07) and their ability to get crisis measures accepted in parliament (R2-10).
