The Federal Republic of Germany — as it was set up by the occupying powers, and particularly the United States, after the Second World War — was intended to deliver Germany a maximum of political and economic stability. Germany got political stability through a democratic constitution that made a priority of the balance of powers, no matter how inefficient it proved. Germany got economic stability through hard money. That meant putting monetary policy in the hands of an institution — the Bundesbank — protected from democratic vicissitudes. The contradiction could easily be finessed as long as Germany's fate was ultimately in the hands of the occupying powers. 

But with Germany changing from Europe's ward to Europe's leader, the system has lost its equipoise. Chancellor Merkel shows a great deal of reverence towards the institutions that grew up under the Bundesrepublik. She even refers properly to today's Germany as the Bundesrepublik. (As a matter of constitutional law, the two Germanys did not "unite" after 1989; the Communist East was admitted to the free West.) Better than any other politician Merkel melds the old and the new. She is the last protégée of Helmut Kohl, the German chancellor who reunified the country and agreed to share a currency with European neighbours. And she is the first East German leader of the Christian Democrats, the archetypally West German party founded by Konrad Adenauer. 

"What people like about her here," one finance ministry aide told me, "is just what they dislike abroad." The word almost everyone uses to describe Merkel is "souverän", a hard-to-translate term that can mean poised and self-sufficient but can also mean smug and snotty. For the most part, it is a positive description. 

Critics of chancellor Merkel claim either that she has lost the feel for democracy or that she never had one to begin with. A common subtext is that you wouldn't expect her to, either, coming as she does from East Germany. For Gesine Schwan, a former Social Democratic presidential candidate, Mrs Merkel has an antipathy to contentiousness and back-and-forth and has depoliticised German life. Ms Schwan is an electoral foe, but misgivings are also beginning to be felt in the chancellor's own party. 

In a particularly ugly incident over the winter, one of her aides, Roland Pofalla, confronted Wolfgang Bosbach, a party loyalist of many years' standing who had misgivings about the latest instalment in the Greek bailout fund, and told him, "I'm sick of looking at your face and listening to your shit." Such stories have been more common in Washington and Westminster than in Bonn or Berlin. By the time I spoke to Bosbach, he had thought a good deal about the implications of the bailouts for democracy. "It may well be that people don't understand every last detail about the Greek budget and the situation on the financial markets," he said. But they have a keen grasp of how successful the rescue measures are likely to be. And up till now, at any rate, the sceptics have been vindicated."