Squeezed by populists from both left and right, Angela Merkel's political demise is all but complete

The most famous geopolitical cartoon Punch ever published was “Dropping the pilot”, showing a weary Bismarck coming down the gangplank of a ship called Germany in 1890 after 28 years as chancellor. Angela Merkel has only done 13 years as her nation’s leader and the time is fast approaching when she has to go. This morning’s announcement that she is stepping down as CDU party leader is a turning point in German and European history.

There seems to be an iron law that 10 years is enough at the top of a modern European nation. Margaret Thatcher appeared utterly dominant a decade after her 1979 election triumph. But a year later she was gone. General de Gaulle dominated French politics from 1958 to 1968 and then suddenly in 1969 he was out. When Spain’s Felipe Gonzalez or Ms Merkel’s predecessor, Helmut Kohl, sought to extend their rule into a second decade, suddenly everything turned sour, opening the door to their opponents winning power.

All of the big party formations of post-1945 Europe have found 21st century politics difficult. The French and Italian socialist parties are all but dead. The Swedish social democratic party has lost its decades-long dominance. Nationalist populist parties rule in eastern EU member states. The French, Spanish and Italian centre-right parties are down and now the same is happening to both social and Christian democrats in Germany. Yesterday’s regional parliament elections in Hesse, the German region around Frankfurt, was as bad for the Social Democrats as for Merkel.

Professor Matthew Goodwin, who predicted the arrival of four or five Ukip MPs in the 2015 election, now writes that the populist, nationalist anti-immigrant parties are conquering Europe. But while the Swedish, German, Italian and Austrian xenophobe nationalists are certainly doing well, so are the Greens, as well as the far-left like Die Linke in Germany, Podemos in Spain, Jean-Luc Melenchon’s leftist gathering in France or Syriza in Greece.

Europe will face patchwork politics rather like Switzerland over the next period as the era of hegemonic one-party rule fades into the past. Populism comes in many forms, not just right-wing varieties.

The proximate cause for Ms Merkel’s downfall – her poll tax moment – was the decision to open German borders to a million refugees and economic migrants fleeing destroyed states in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Islamist fundamentalists in sub-Saharan Africa. In the summer of 2015 demonstrators in southern Europe painted Hitler moustaches on posters of Ms Merkel’s face as they protested the cruel treatment of Greece, Portugal and Spain by the ruthless application of the Ordoliberalismus economic ideology of fiscal austerity imposed by Berlin and its helpmates in the Netherlands, Finland, and other governments where Keynes and counter-cyclical policy are taboo.

Overnight Ms Merkel became the darling of liberal, generous Europe and the posters with the Hitler moustache on her upper lip disappeared. But she had not consulted with neighbouring governments and expected them to take a share of Arab and African refugees and migrants. The backlash was inevitable in Hungary and Poland. Inside Germany and the Alternative für Deutschland turned from an anti-Euro party into a fully-fledged racist anti-immigrant party that has stolen CDU votes.

She has been leader of the CDU since 2000 and that era now ends. There is little point in staying on as chancellor. But her life in politics may not be over. She has always said her last challenge is to put Europe back on its feet. There has been talk in Brussels and Berlin that she could be the first woman president of the European Commission next year, to form a Macro-Merkel tandem to lead a post-Brexit reformed EU. So we may not have seen the last of this remarkable politician.

Denis MacShane is the UK’s former Europe minister who writes on European policy and politics and is published in the German press