This is Paul Adamson and I'm in conversation with Yan Teshaw.

Yan Teshaw is the director of Carnegie Europe, the European think tank of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

We're going to be talking about Germany, Jan, and Angela Merkel and the role of Germany in Europe.

So let's start with this.

Last year, 2015, Time magazine made Angela Merkel Person of the Year, the Financial Times.

Last year also nominated her as Person of the Year.

Does Angela Merkel deserve all these accolades?

Yeah, partly I think she does.

She's quite an exceptional

leader, I think. She is not free from the sins of politicians, which means that she actually

does flip-flop on things. She's not always that straightforward as people make her out to be.

But overall, she's a pretty exceptional and impressive leader. She came out of nowhere with no battalions in her own party

and now dominates that party and the entire German political scene. Nobody can really imagine

her being replaced by anybody. There's no obvious kind of competition there. She was smart

enough to kill them all off or to relegate them to third tier kind of jobs.

So she's pretty dominant in the German scene, and she's taken on one or two tasks within the European context that were also quite exceptional, the Euro crisis obviously,

where not everybody liked her leadership, but where she was a leader, and on the Russian-Ukraine conundrum,

in both cases she embraced it reluctantly.

She didn't want to do it at first,

but then she realized that she was the last man standing, really,

and that she needed to do it,

and that Germany in those cases was the reserve power of Europe,

...