Merkel at the top

SUMMITS are good for Angela Merkel. Germans like to watch the chancellor hobnob with the world's most powerful men. She stands out, for braininess and for bringing a flash of colour to the dark-suited scrums. But she undoubtedly belongs. Thanks to the euro crisis, summits happen almost as often as Republican presidential debates, giving Mrs Merkel frequent opportunities to press Germany's case, in her quietly insistent way. She was the opening speaker at the Davos powerfest on January 25th. On January 30th she will meet fellow European leaders in Brussels for yet another summit on the euro.

Mrs Merkel does not always prevail and often fails to persuade. The IMF's head, Christine Lagarde, warned in Berlin on January 23rd that the world faces a “1930s moment”. German obduracy on the euro might be a cause, she implied. But the crisis is no longer weakening Mrs Merkel at home. Talk of mutiny within her coalition has subsided since the Bundestag voted overwhelmingly in favour of bail-outs for peripheral euro zone countries late last year. And the public mood has changed. Early on, most Germans blamed feckless Greeks for the euro's troubles. Now “people see that it's not just about Greece but about European stability as a whole,” says Manfred Güllner of Forsa, a pollster. When Mrs Merkel negotiates, people think “she's taking care of them.”