Politics & Power Quote by Angela Merkel

A technocrat’s understatement doing the work of an alarm bell. Merkel frames the problem not as a procedural glitch in Brussels but as a visceral gap: people “do not feel” they can “relate.” That choice of language matters. It shifts the EU’s legitimacy crisis from GDP charts and treaty clauses to identity, recognition, and everyday dignity - the territory where populism feeds.

The subtext is also characteristically Merkelian: caution disguised as candor. “We have to react” is a deliberately modest verb for a massive political threat. She’s not promising transformation; she’s signaling responsiveness without conceding ideological ground. In Merkel’s political grammar, acknowledging emotion is already a strategic escalation, because it admits that rational governance alone won’t hold the project together.

Context sharpens the line. In the 2010s - amid the eurozone crisis, austerity politics, migration pressures, Brexit, and the rise of nationalist parties - the EU became an easy symbol for distance: elites, bureaucracy, rules without faces. Merkel, often cast as the de facto leader of Europe, is implicitly conceding that the EU’s achievements (peace, mobility, market integration) are not self-communicating. If citizens experience Europe mainly as constraints - fiscal limits, border debates, faceless directives - then “Europe” stops being a shared roof and starts feeling like someone else’s house.

The intent, then, is political triage: reattach governance to narrative, institutions to belonging. Merkel is warning that the EU can’t just be correct; it has to be legible.