Angela Merkel shares both the Christian faith and the undeviating moral compass of George W. Bush and Tony Blair. In this, she is quite unlike her predecessor Gerhard Schröder, who was German Chancellor during the years after 9/11 and who capitalised on anti-American sentiment in German elections during that period. Immediately after his defeat at Angela Merkel's hands, Schröder accepted a lucrative post working for an arm of the Kremlin, the energy monopoly Gazprom. It is inconceivable that Frau Merkel would allow herself to be tempted by an offer, however generous, from a regime whose record is so utterly at odds with the values of Western civilisation, and which barely disguises its anti-Semitism. Before she was elected, she gave her word to the people of Israel that she would never make any concessions to anti-Semitism: "We will fight with determination against this and use all legal means at our disposal. It is important to heighten the society's awareness of the meaning of anti-Semitism, which means the hatred of mankind." Frau Merkel has stuck to her guns on this crucial test of the West, going out of her way to build close relations with Israel, regardless of the conflicts on its borders and the weight of international hostility.

Germany's most important relationship in the Muslim world is with Turkey. The country's largest ethnic minority is much younger than the rest of the German population, and much of the Sarrazin controversy concerns the impact of Germany's failure to integrate its Turkish citizens into the education system. Sarrazin argues that the result of mass immigration and de facto segregation has been a drastic decline in educational standards. His claims are hotly disputed but the fact remains that international comparisons over the past decade, in particular the OECD's league table Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa), suggest that Germany has long since lost its reputation as Europe's most highly educated nation, and is now performing at or below the OECD average. How far this can be attributed to the failure to integrate German Muslims is moot, but it is clear that under Angela Merkel there is no question of Germany permitting a huge new influx of Turkish or other Muslim migrants.

There are other reasons why Turkish membership of the EU is unthinkable for Frau Merkel. Having shouldered the burden of saving Greece from bankruptcy, the German Chancellor is not about to risk taking on the incomparably greater liability of its neighbour and rival, Turkey. As if to reinforce the danger, a parcel bomb, addressed to Frau Merkel and apparently sent by Greek terrorists, was defused in Berlin last month. Undaunted, she still advocates penalising bankrupt member states by depriving them of voting rights. Together with her flinty Finance Minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, Chancellor Merkel is determined to defend and police the Eurozone more strictly. She fears a return to the instability of the past two years. In an interview with the Financial Times, she denounced countries where "growth was built on debt and [speculative] bubbles. I now see the world in some regions returning to a sensible growth path. The greatest danger that threatens us is protectionism, and we are still not taking enough steps to ensure genuinely free trade." 

Inevitably, some have compared Angela Merkel to Margaret Thatcher. On the economy, the German Chancellor has already proved herself worthy of the comparison — an iron lady indeed. The spectre of the Weimar Republic and its catastrophic economic consequences still haunts the Berlin Chancellery. Ironically, however, that is precisely why Frau Merkel had to distance herself from Sarrazin, only to embrace his critique of multiculturalism, after an indecently brief interval. German public opinion likes leaders to be tough-minded on economics but is easily intimidated by the aggressive assertion of the interests of radical Islam under the guise of the rights of a victimised minority.