WHEN Nicola Sturgeon appeared yesterday on Ridge on Sunday, the interviewer was keen to stress how long the SNP had been in power in Scotland. Fourteen years to get things right yet so much still wrong was the gist of the attack.

(Unsurprisingly, Ms Sturgeon did not agree with this assessment, though she again conceded that not enough had been done to cut the shockingly high number of drug deaths.)

Fourteen years, though. First Minister for half that time. Heading for another term as First Minister should her party win the Scottish Parliament elections on May 6. A long time in politics, indeed.

Still, when it comes to longevity, Ms Sturgeon still has some way to go to beat the record of Angela Merkel.

The German Chancellor has been one of the great survivors of modern politics. She has outlasted prime ministers Blair, Brown, Cameron, and May. Presidents Bush, Obama, Trump: watched them arrive and depart as well.

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Abroad she made her mark. At home she negotiated the tricky waters of German politics and made it look easy.

As Ms Merkel prepares to leave office in September after nearly 16 years as Chancellor, there is much in her career that other leaders can learn from – the failures especially.

First lesson: do not hang around too long once you have decided to go. Ms Merkel announced in 2018 that she would be stepping down as leader of the centre-right Christian Democrats, but carrying on as Chancellor.

Since then, power has drained from her grasp, as it inevitably would any leader in such a situation. Imagine Boris Johnson or Nicola Sturgeon, giving notice of their departure, or becoming so weakened as to make a vacancy look inevitable. Their last months in office would be taken up with rivals jockeying for the leadership, as has happened with Ms Merkel. Her party's standing in the polls has suffered as a result.

Any leader at the top for as long as the Chancellor runs the risk of becoming so distanced from their party, and the country, that they misread the mood and pursue the wrong policy.

With Margaret Thatcher it was the poll tax. With the First Minister it could be the timing of a second independence referendum. With Ms Merkel it was her 2015 decision to open Germany’s doors to more than a million refugees.

It was a move that earned the Chancellor plaudits abroad. Other leaders looked at the terrible pictures of refugees struggling to reach safety and said what a tragedy it was. Yet they did nothing. Ms Merkel acted.

At home she presented the policy as the right thing to do morally and economically. An ageing German population needed new workers, both to pay tax into the pot and to look after the elderly.

While many could see the sense in her analysis, the number of people that arrived proved to be a problem.

“We can do this,” the Chancellor told her country. It turned out they could not, or not without stoking tensions that were exploited by a resurgent far right that remains a serious problem to this day.

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Voters punished Ms Merkel’s party in the elections that followed. For the first time in her Chancellorship, “Mutti” had begun to look vulnerable.

Yet she was able to carry on, her trademark “cool in a crisis” demeanour still earning just enough respect on the national and international stages.

She might have limped through the rest of her time in office. But then came Covid-19. The last year has been disastrous for Ms Merkel, and when she finally leaves office it will be very much under a cloud.

In a YouGov poll on public satisfaction with how governments had handled the crisis, Germany had the lowest score, 21%, behind France on 25%.

At a national and at EU level, Ms Merkel’s leadership has been absent and her judgment badly off. Germany’s federal system of government helped at first but then became a hindrance as regional leaders went their own way on restrictions and lockdowns. Even so, she has made personal mistakes, including casting doubt on the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine for older people.

As a result of the chaos and hesitancy, the vaccine rollout across the EU has taken far longer than in the UK and the US. By the end of March, 11.1% of EU citizens had been given a first dose, compared to 28.4% in the US and 45.1% in the UK.

Germany is now catching up, with 66-year-old Ms Merkel having her jab (AstraZeneca) last Friday. Yet the damage to her reputation has been done. If the most important test of leadership is to leave a country in a better position than you found it, Ms Merkel has failed.

She is hardly alone in that. It would be a strange leader who did not look at a pandemic-hit world and worry about paying the bills when they fall due.

Though she is not standing again, the September elections will inevitably be a verdict on the Chancellor’s record during the pandemic. The same goes for Ms Sturgeon, though her stewardship has been widely praised.

There is one more connection between the two worth pointing out: in both the Scottish and German elections the Greens are expected to do so well they will be given seats in government.

As someone said at her last Cabinet meeting, it’s a funny old world.