Sarkozy is no more, so Merkel now becomes the face of this joyless realism, of this reality which is perhaps all too real in the sense that the pose of ideological realism, the neoliberal pose a la Fukuyama that its ideology is the ultimate vision of what is real, the end of the debate about what is real and in that sense the end of history, leads only to a terrifying oppression. This is an oppression without alternative, as Merkel would have it. Except that now, as the electorate awakens, an alternative appears, and the possibility of something like socialism or economic justice opposes the fetishistic cruelty of Merkel’s real. She is the perfect figure for her role—the blunt, unadorned style of a chemist, as if oppression by the corporate elite was a modern science rather than a medieval scheme of alchemy. And the electorate has only to challenge this oppression to draw out its archaic jingoism (“Germany will not pay for French socialism”) and its reversion to terroristic prophecy.
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