Angela Merkel’s 16 years as Chancellor of Germany ended last night on a nostalgic, even bathetic note, with a torchlit military parade accompanied by a band playing a Communist-era East German pop song. 

The ceremony, broadcast live to the German nation, marks the end of the Merkel era. This Grosser Zapfenstreich dates back three centuries to Frederick the Great, who imported ceremonies by torchlight from Tsarist Russia. Mrs Merkel might not seem to have much in common with Prussia’s most martial monarch, but she was brought up in Bandenburg, the heartland of “Old Fritz”, and there is something profoundly Prussian about her legacy.

It isn’t just her frugality and formality, her sentimentality and ruthlessness, her love of rules and regulations that mark her out as a proper Prussian. In her long reign Mrs Merkel has recast Germany in her own image: happy to carry on pretending that everything is fine, when in reality every major problem is postponed, evaded or brushed under the carpet. As so often in its chequered history, Merkel’s Germany is a nation in denial.

The evasions began soon after she took office in 2005. The financial crash hit Europe hard, and soon morphed into a crisis of the euro. Rather than loosen the straightjacket of the single currency, however, the Merkel government forced the weaker EU members to endure austerity policies and crippling unemployment rates in order to keep German exports competitive. Her intransigence reminded smaller EU countries of their suffering under German domination in the distant past. Greece, which was worst hit by austerity, has still neither recovered nor forgiven Mrs Merkel. Most Germans, though, ignore the fact that they remain beneficiaries of an artificially low exchange rate, instead imagining that they are bailing out the rest of Europe.

Around the same time, the Fukushima disaster panicked Germany. Mrs Merkel persuaded herself that abandoning nuclear power was a sensible policy, when in reality it forced Germany to rely on filthy “brown coal” (lignite) and Russian gas. The Nord Stream 2 pipeline, now awaiting regulatory approval, is a strategic nightmare, giving President Putin more leverage at Ukrainian expense. She could have halted Gasprom’s project at any time in the last 15 years, but she never dared.

Such moral cowardice showed in the next crisis, over migration. It began with Mrs Merkel taking a tough line, which she abruptly reversed after appeals from refugee children. Her offer to accept undocumented migrants from Syria was born of a mixture of genuine sympathy and fear of international criticism: Germans could never be seen to put refugees behind barbed wire. But she never expected a million asylum-seekers to arrive, nor that her neighbours would refuse to pick up the pieces. 

In the end, a temporary solution was found by bribing the Turks to keep them in camps — enabling the autocratic President Erdogan to blackmail the EU. Germans have convinced themselves that her gesture restored their moral authority; in reality, it has solved nothing, as the new crisis on Poland’s borders shows.

This largely unnecessary migration crisis led directly Brexit, another case where her Prussian obsession with inflexible rules led the EU to lose a key member state — a disaster for which its collective leadership still denies responsibility. David Cameron tried hard to cultivate Mrs Merkel, but she never believed his warnings that the British would vote to leave. 

This stubborn refusal to face the fact that the EU was rejected by popular vote still persists, fed by a wariness of democracy inherited from the “Red Prussia” of her youth. The fall of the Berlin Wall, her most formative experience, did not teach her to trust the people — rather, the opposite. 

Mrs Merkel has always prided herself on being tough in her dealings with dictators. She speaks fluent Russian, but this has not deterred Vladimir Putin from trying to intimidate her — exploiting her nervousness of dogs, for example, by allowing his hounds into one of their meetings. 

While Mrs Merkel has championed human rights and the rule of law, she never dared to stand up to Russian, Chinese or Iranian leaders. Notwithstanding Georgia and Ukraine, Hong Kong and Taiwan, Israel or Syria: where vital German interests are at stake, business is business.

With Donald Trump, Mrs Merkel could allow herself more liberties. Yet she neither sought nor deserved the roles of “leader of the free world” or feminist icon which some conferred on her. However unpretentious, she has become a pretender to greatness.

Unlike the truly great Prussians, Frederick II and Bismarck, Angela Merkel was a figurehead but never a fighter. The Iron Chancellor saw politics as the art of the possible, yet achieved the impossible. For the Teflon Chancellor to whom we now bid farewell, politics was about promising to move with the times while actually clinging to the past. She leaves behind a geriatric Germany and an enfeebled Europe.

Daniel Johnson is the editor of TheArticle. He reported on the fall of Berlin Wall for the Daily Telegraph.