The man who has been so eloquently selling Chancellor Angela Merkel and her policies to the German public as a government spokesman for the last 3 years, 9 months and two weeks has been furloughed.

But Thomas Steg’s voluntary departure in Berlin just 2 months and 2 weeks before the federal election has raised more than a few eyebrows — he is not leaving his post as deputy government spokesman to go off and write a book or study horticulture but rather he will be leading the election campaign communications efforts of the man who wants to knock Merkel out of office — SPD candidate Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

Steg’s surprise move has shocked and dismayed some in Merkel’s Christian Democrats who fear his inside knowledge of Merkel and her foibles might prove to be dynamite if used by Steinmeier. His Social Democrats trail Merkel’s conservative bloc in opinion polls by more than 10 points ahead of the Sept. 27 election and there is a whiff of desperation in the move. Yet the conservatives are nervous about Steg’s switching sides just as the campaign heats up. “There are some close to Merkel who fear that he could now provide all sorts of confidential information to Steinmeier,” wrote Stern magazine. “Steg knows everything — about the strengths, the weaknesses and the CDU’s election strategy.”

Even though Merkel’s CDU and the SPD have been locked in their awkward grand coalition government since 2005, Steg’s loyalties seemed to lie clearly with Merkel even though he is an SPD member and was first appointed to the job by SPD Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in 2002 after working as his speechwriter. Steg nevertheless proved to be a valuable and faithful spokesman for Merkel, alongside her chief spokesman Ulrich Wilhelm.

Last summer at the height of the Barack-Obama-at-the-Brandenburg-Gate-affair, Steg unambiguously and ardently presented Merkel’s point of view to the media that a U.S. presidential candidate should not be allowed to speak at the historic landmark even though a spokesman for Steinmeier, Germany’s Foreign Minister who favoured Obama’s speaking at the Brandenburg Gate, took a diametrically opposed position. The disagreement between the two spokesmen was one of the most riveting government news conferences of the last decade.

It was hard to think of Steg as anything but a Merkel man after that. Some in the SPD had already long written off Steg a turncoat who sold the chancellor far better than he had to. Merkel had agreed to keep him in her chancellery after defeating Schroeder in 2005 because she realised she needed someone with some government experience. “We’ll give it a try,” she said in 2005.

Even before the Obama spat, Steg had endeared himself to Merkel for his delicate and confident handling of the public furore that erupted in Germany after she was pictured wearing a dress with a plunging neckline to the opera in Oslo. “The Chancellor is a little bit surprised,” Steg told a government news conference when asked about the front page pictures of Merkel in the glamorous dress. “That this evening gown — which is a new composition, a new arrangement, if you will — from the chancellor’s collection would cause such a furore is not something that the chancellor intended,” Steg told the news conference with his customary straight face.

Maybe it’s just a very Germanic-like sense of duty that made Steg such an astonishingly reliable spokesman for Merkel and could make him just as competent to Steinmeier. But how credible will he be if Steinmeier’s campaign script calls for him to start slinging mud at Merkel?

PHOTOS: Top: Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel attends the inauguration of the Oslo Opera House April 12, 2008. Bottom: Merkel’s deputy spokeman Thomas Steg addresses a news conference in Berlin.

The ferocity of the reaction in the German media to the fortress-like new U.S. embassy in Berlin, which former U.S. President George Bush will inaugurate on Friday, strikes me as a reflection of the strains in German-U.S. relations since 2003’s Iraq conflict.

It underlines just how long gone the days of the Cold War really are. Then, when Berlin was the front line in the Cold War, America was West Germany’s best friend and U.S. soldiers were welcome across the country.

Architectural crticis in Germany have slammed the boxy building with narrow windows as being reminiscent of Baghdad’s Green Zone.

The embassy is a picture of a country traumatised by 9/11 and by the consequences of globalisation, of a nation with such heavy armour that it can no longer see the world,” wrote conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung earlier this year.

Other critics have been just as hostile, deriding it as a discount supermarket, a prison, a bunker and like Fort Knox.

Admittedly, the beige building — in the heart of the city next to the Brandenburg Gate and just metres from where the Berlin Wall used to stand — looks rather bland and the metal bollards emphasise the barrier between the embassy and Berlin’s residents and tourists. But it isn’t so different from U.S. embassies in other European capitals which have boosted security.

Germans who fondly remember former U.S. President John F. Kennedy declaring “Ich bin ein Berliner” in 1963 and former President Ronald Reagan calling on the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall” in 1987 long for an improvement in trans-Atlantic relations.

U.S. officials hope the new building will show America’s “warmer, fuzzier” side, although whether either the embassy building or November’s U.S. election will herald a significant improvement in ties is another matter.

And as if the embassy, which cost about 80 million euros and only went ahead after a protracted and ugly public dispute with Berlin officials about how to make the embassy secure without moving two busy nearby streets 30 metres away, hasn’t courted enough controversy, Michael Reagan, son of the former president, was this week reported as saying Berlin should commemorate his father’s contribution to bringing down the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall. Here’s the piece from Der Tagesspiegel.

The Cold War is over. There is a chill in German-U.S. relations.

Berlin has had a deep and enduring love affair with American presidents. Berliners have never forgotten the U.S. leaders who helped keep West Berlin free during the Cold War with the Airlift and many can still recite the words of John F. Kennedy’s  legendary “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech at City Hall in 1963.
 
So it is all the more glaring that George W. Bush has once again avoided the German capital on his fifth and final visit  to the country , spending just minutes at Berlin airport on his way in and out of Germany.
 
It was also odd that Bush failed to mention the Airlift, one of the brightest moments of post-war U.S. foreign policy, at his news conference with Chancellor Angela Merkel in the rural village of Meseberg (pop. 150) about 100 km (60 miles) north of  the capital. The Airlift’s 60th anniversary is being marked this month and was supposed to be the reason for Bush’s visit.
 
Perhaps  it was the memories of 10,000 anti-war protesters who disrupted Bush’s first and only stay in Berlin in May 2002. Or maybe it was the recollections of the 10,000 German police needed to guard him in the centre of Berlin, which he turned into a veritable ghost town. Bush lamented about “living in a bubble” when he was here for 20 hours in 2002. His next trip was to Mainz, a provincial city in the far west — there were anti-war protests there too. After that he went to small northeastern villages in 2006 and 2007 — but stayed clear of Berlin.
 
The reason is clear — Iraq. Former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder won re-election against long odds in 2002 by standing up to Bush on Iraq, a hugely popular position in war-scarred Germany that nevertheless got him ostracised by Bush.
 
Differences were later patched up, but even Bush acknowledged in Meseberg on Wednesday: “It’s obviously been a contentious issue between our countries in the past.”
 
Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper columnist Kurt Kister wrote: “Bush is spending his entire visit hidden away in the provincial town of Meseberg. Meseberg has the advantage that it’s easy to seal it off from the rest of the world with fences
and police. It’s not surprising because for the overwhelming majority of Germans Bush is the most unpopular U.S. president in the last two generations.”
 
As an American who’s lived in Berlin for much of the past 15 years, I have felt at first hand the city’s affinity for all things American. In 1994, I saw tears running down the cheeks of American GIs, overwhelmed by 250,000 cheering Berliners giving them a
thunderous farewell, as  the city’s Cold War defence force marched in a farewell parade .
 
And I have seen the tens of thousands that lined  the streets to cheer Bill Clinton in 1993, when he became the first U.S.  president to walk through the Brandenburg Gate, and in 1998 when he came to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Airlift. Clinton even went for jogs in the city’s Tiergarten park and dropped into trendy restaurants with only minimal protection.
 
So, after watching Bush avoid Berlin for the fourth time and knowing how fond Berliners are of America, I’m wondering what’s next. Will the next U.S. president be able to or want to walk the streets of Berlin again? Will that perhaps be a useful barometer?  What does it say  about the state of international affairs if the world’s most powerful leader doesn’t feel welcome and safe in a city that, in many ways, owes its very survival to U.S. presidents?