This paper focuses on the agency of Angela Merkel as the German Chancellor in between the Euro crisis and the current migrant crisis. In both cases, Merkel had to face transnational competition and opposition, investing a lot of her personal political capital in order to push and legitimise her own line, domestically as well as at the EU level. In doing so, she seemingly took two opposite political stances, more solidaristic and integrationist in the migration case, more inward-looking and nationalistic in dealing with the Euro crisis. When considering the nature of the two crises and the interplay of different domestic and European constraints, however, there is ground to argue that the rationale of her political positioning is more consistent than it seems. Goal of this paper is to compare and interpret Merkel's agency across the two fields. To do so, the paper will propose a novel concept of Euro-leadership, which applies the notions of "statecraft" and "statecraft cycle" in a transnational setting. Problematising the relation between power, leadership and "valuing" (alongside Heclo's famous dyad "puzzling and powering"), the paper adopts a neo-weberian approach to the exercise of transnational government responsibilities under democratic constraints. On the one hand, the role of personality will be taken into account in analysing how Merkel picked her fights and chose her stances. On the other hand, the paper will elaborate on a less structuralist and more actor-centred understanding of democratic representation by elaborating on the concepst of "audience democracy" and "ocular democracy". The paper is an early product of “Democratic Statecraft and its Discontents”, a research endeavour carried out within the framework of Maurizio Ferrera’s ERC project “Reconciling Economic and Social Europe: the role of ideas, values and politics” (REScEU, www.resceu.eu).
