#patrick mcgroarty

The rumble of tanks and the report of heavy artillery have given way after six decades in the rolling hills east of Frankfurt to more soothing tones: the gentle neighing of wild horses. Przewalski's horses, as they are called. The last breed of horse never to have been domesticated. These horses once ranged from Southern Europe to Mongolia. Today, a herd of nine roams at Campo Pond, a 250-acre former U.S. military training ground here in western Germany. They are here only temporarily, assembled from zoos across Germany and beyond, awaiting transfer to the Asian steppe as part of an international effort to boost their remaining numbers there. Better for Animals In the meantime, they are part of a growing taxonomy of wildlife reasserting itself in Germany as numbers of people decline and conditions of natural habitats improve. According to government statistics, Germany's population, hit by falling birth rates, has shrunk by 700,000 from a high around 82.5 million in 2002, and could fall to under 65 million by 2060. Local forests, rivers and grasslands, meanwhile, have benefited from intensive environmental restoration and adoption of less-polluting methods by factories and power plants. To those with a direct hand in the return of some species, like Przewalski's horses, it's a dream come true. "They're almost like unicorns, like white elephants," says Christoph Goebel, leader of the federal forestry office that is overseeing the Campo Pond project from nearby Schwarzenborn. "There's a special magic to seeing them—it gives you goose bumps." Other once-vanished species regaining their footings include wolves and bears, which were hunted out of German forests centuries ago but now feast on exploding populations of deer and wild boar. Salmon, too, formerly choked from their Rhine River spawning beds, are swimming and jumping again thanks to an aggressive cleanup of the river and surrounding areas. Nature's triumph can be a nuisance for Germans obliged to commune with a growing number of wild neighbors. In 2006, Germans were captivated by the exploits of the first wild Eurasian brown bear to be spotted in the country in almost two centuries. Initially dubbed "Bruno," the bruin soon earned a second nickname as "the problem bear" after he made a habit of raiding Bavarian sheep herds, chicken coops and beehives. After an unsuccessful attempt by Finnish trackers to tranquilize and relocate him, local hunters shot and killed him. His stuffed carcass is now on display at a Bavarian museum, where he towers over a toppled beehive inside a glass display case. A less dramatic struggle between man and beast is playing out in eastern Germany, where a number of wolf packs roam the forests and fields—to the delight of environmentalists and the horror of many hunters and farmers. "Shepherds we can help. You can go to them and say, 'We support you, we'll help you live with the wolves,' " says Ilka Reinhardt, a biologist who has tracked the wolves since 2002 for government authorities. "But the minute there's one wolf, hunters say there are too many and claim that there isn't enough game left for them to hunt." Salmon in the Rhine But wildlife isn't flourishing just in the east and Bavarian countryside. Below the surface of the Rhine, the shipping thoroughfare that sustains Germany's industrial heartland, cleaner manufacturing methods and the fading imprint of coal mining have encouraged the return of the Atlantic salmon. Tens of billions of euros have been spent improving the water quality and building a series of fish ladders that allow the salmon to maneuver around dams to swim upstream. Making the river safe again for salmon and eels is as good for people as it is for the fish, says Ben van de Wetering, secretary general of the Cologne-based International Commission for the Protection of the Rhine.

German politics has gotten a lot more complex. And nobody has navigated that complexity better than Angela Merkel. Associated Press German Chancellor Angela Merkel is known for being able to read the public mood. BERLIN—German politics used to be a simple affair: Conservative Christian Democrats contested for power with left-leaning Social Democrats. Each of the big parties had millions of loyal voters and sought a small-party ally to make up numbers in parliament. Now, neither of the two big parties can be sure of mass support any more. And once-small parties, such as the Greens and the pro-business Free Democrats, can suddenly attract mass support—and watch it collapse just as quickly. The unpredictability of Germany's current political scene reflects a society that has become more complex. The old ideological divide between left and right has given way to diverse demands for growth and economic security, for environmental virtue and industrial prowess, and for cultural identity amid a rising share of immigrants in the European Union's most populous country. Angela Merkel, federal chancellor since 2005, has built her power on being Germany's best politician at navigating the shifting tides of public opinion. Her ability to read the public mood and form new majorities has made her the axle on which the system turns. But it has also required some dramatic shifts in Ms. Merkel's policies, opening her up to the criticism that she's an über-pragmatist with no consistent principles. 'Tack and Jibe' "She likes to tack and jibe her way through the fog, but does she have a compass?," asks Gerd Langguth, the chancellor's biographer and party colleague. "What is her vision for the country? That's the enigma," he says. In March this year, when Japan's earthquake and tsunami set off the nuclear disaster at Fukushima, nervous voters in the southern German state of Baden-Württemberg turned against Ms. Merkel's pro-nuclear conservatives and flocked to the antinuclear Greens ahead of state elections. Ms. Merkel promptly upended her stance on nuclear energy, which she had pushed only last year as the answer to Germany's need for energy security and reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions. After Fukushima, she shut down Germany's older nuclear reactors and launched a policy review that led to a decision to phase out nuclear energy entirely by 2022. Parliament is set to approve the new timeline this summer. The U-turn angered many of her own conservative colleagues in the Christian Democratic Union, or CDU, as well as Germany's energy companies. It was especially hard to stomach for her junior coalition partner, the industry-friendly Free Democratic Party, or FDP. It also didn't save her center-right party from defeat in Baden-Württemberg: Voters in the state, a longtime conservative bastion, didn't buy Ms. Merkel's sudden conversion. The state now has its first-ever Green premier. But Ms. Merkel is sticking to her new course, and is attempting to turn her CDU into a nuclear-skeptic party despite grumbling from the party's pro-business right. "I tell you very personally—my thinking on nuclear energy has changed," Ms. Merkel told a CDU conference in May. One reason for the change, say political analysts, is the popularity of the Greens, and the unpopularity of her party's current partner, the FDP. By shutting down nuclear plants, Ms. Merkel is neutralizing one of the Greens' strongest cards—as well as eliminating a policy difference that could prevent a future alliance between the Greens and her CDU. The FDP, which helped the CDU to win Germany's last national elections in 2009, is feeling unloved by Ms. Merkel these days. Many in the FDP fear she is preparing to drop them overboard after the next national elections in 2013. East to West It isn't the first big shift by Ms. Merkel, a 56-year-old trained physicist who grew up in Communist East Germany and entered politics only after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. As opposition leader after 2000, she styled herself as a free-market reformer who would cut taxes and deregulate Germany's labor market. But her radical stance proved unpopular in Germany's 2005 elections, when the CDU won the most seats in parliament but fell short of a majority. Ms. Merkel was forced to form a bipartisan coalition with her biggest rivals, the Social Democrats, or SPD. She reinvented herself as a leader almost left of center, borrowing many of the SPD's policies, such as strong workers' rights and state intervention to support Germany's car industry. It worked. The CDU won new left-leaning voters, although conservatives grew disillusioned with the pragmatic chancellor. In 2009's elections, she dominated the center ground and formed a new center-right government with the FDP, which won a record 15% of the vote with its call for tax cuts. The FDP's bubble quickly burst, though. Its hope for tax cuts—almost its only clear policy—was thwarted when Ms. Merkel decided to focus on cutting the budget deficit instead, reacting to public anxiety about rising government debt. Guido Westerwelle, who led the FDP for a decade and now serves as Ms. Merkel's foreign minister, struggled to adapt from the shrill sound bites of opposition politics to the more statesmanlike demeanor needed in government. Abysmal results for the party in recent state elections suggest it will be very difficult to repeat a CDU-FDP victory in the 2013 national elections, and cost Mr. Westerwelle his job as party chairman. Shifting Alliances Instead, analysts say Ms. Merkel is preparing her party to exploit other options if necessary: a repeat of the bipartisan coalition with the SPD, or a novel alliance with the Greens. Both options horrify many conservatives in the CDU, who complain that Ms. Merkel's pragmatism has robbed the party of any clearly conservative identity. They blame her willingness to tack left for the decline in CDU support, from 34% in the 2009 elections to around 30% in the latest opinion poll. But despite the CDU right's grumbles, Ms. Merkel's leadership appears unassailable for now. In recent years a string of potential rivals have fallen away as potential threats, or even left the party. Roland Koch, the powerful right-wing premier of the state of Hesse, left politics last year to go into business. Christian Wulff, the popular premier of Lower Saxony, accepted Ms. Merkel's entreaties last year to become Germany's president, a largely ceremonial role. The biggest threat to the chancellor is that the Greens and SPD could win a majority without her, and form a "Red-Green" coalition government echoing the administration of Gerhard Schröder, Ms. Merkel's predecessor from 1998 to 2005. Recent opinion polls suggest the Greens and SPD could defeat Ms. Merkel together. Even though support for the SPD is languishing at a historic low of around 22%, the Greens' record support of around 27% would be just enough to wrest control of parliament. Coming Test Such a defeat would test Ms. Merkel's supremacy in the CDU, which she has dominated for a decade. The party has quickly dumped leaders who couldn't win elections—even Germany's great conservative chancellors Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Kohl. But the Greens may well struggle to maintain their current support, especially now that they must show they can govern in the economically important state of Baden-Württemberg. "Whether the Greens will stay so strong is questionable," says Manfred Güllner, head of the opinion-polling institute Forsa. "They are so strong because others are making so many mistakes," he says. Most analysts described Ms. Merkel's U-turn on nuclear energy as a mistake after it failed to save her party from defeat in Baden-Württemberg. But Ms. Merkel has her sights set on retaining power in 2013. If her new environmentalist stance succeeds in taming the rampant Greens in two years' time, she will have pulled off her greatest tactical maneuver yet. Mr. McGroarty is a staff reporter for Dow Jones Newswires in Berlin. He can be reached at [email protected]. Marcus Walker in Berlin contributed to this article.