No regrets: Merkel looks back at refugee crisis, Russia ties, rise of AfD

Former German chancellor Angela Merkel has given­ a spirited defence of her 16 years at the helm of Europe’s top economy in her memoir Freedom, released in 30 languages on Tuesday.

Former German Chancellor and leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) Angela Merkel. Picture: AFP

Former German chancellor Angela Merkel has given­ a spirited defence of her 16 years at the helm of Europe’s top economy in her memoir Freedom, released in 30 languages on Tuesday.

Since she stepped down in 2021, Dr Merkel has been accused of having been too soft on Russia, leaving Germany dangerously reliant on cheap Russian gas and sparking turmoil and the rise of the far right with her open-door migrant policy.

In the full memoir, co-written with longtime adviser Beate Baumann, she gives further insights into her thoughts and actions regarding encounters with Russian President Vladimir Putin and former US president Donald Trump, who she felt “was captivated by politicians with autocratic and dictatorial tendencies”. She also addresses the 2015 mass refugee influx, which came to define the final years of her leadership.

Critics have charged that Dr Merkel’s refusal to push back large numbers of asylum-seekers at the Austrian border led to more than one million arrivals and fuelled the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).

While affirming that “Europe must always protect its external borders”, she stresses that “prosperity and the rule of law will ­always make Germany and Europe ... places where people want to go”.

In addition, she writes in the French edition of the book, fast-ageing Germany’s “lack of manpower makes legal migration essential”.

Her bold declaration at the time – “wir schaffen das” or “we can do this” – was a “banal” statement with the message that “where there are obstacles, we must work to overcome them”, she argues.

And on the AfD, she cautions Germany’s mainstream parties against adopting its rhetoric “without proposing concrete solutions to existing problems”, warning that with such an approach mainstream movements “will fail”.

Dr Merkel, who speaks Russian, also defends her engagement over the years with Putin, who speaks German – despite her misgivings about the former KGB agent, who once allowed a labrador into a meeting between them, apparently playing on her fear of dogs.

She describes the Russian leader as “a man perpetually on the lookout, afraid of being mistreated and always ready to strike, including by playing at exercising his power with a dog and making ­others wait”.

Nevertheless, she says that ­“despite all the difficulties” she was right “not to let contacts with Russia be broken off ... and to also preserve ties through trade relations”.

The reality is, she argues, that “Russia is, with the US, one of the two main nuclear powers”.

Dr Merkel, 70, also defends her opposition to Ukraine joining NATO at a 2008 Bucharest ­summit, considering it illusory to think that candidate status would have protected it from Putin’s ­aggression.

After the summit, she remembers flying home with the feeling that “we in NATO had no common strategy for dealing with Russia”.

Russia’s full-scale attack on Ukraine in February 2022, and the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, cut Germany off from cheap Russian gas, with the taps’ closure a key driver of its ongoing economic malaise. But Dr Merkel ­rejects criticism for having allowed the Baltic Sea pipelines in the first place, pointing out that Nord Stream 1 was signed off on by her predecessor, Social Democrat Gerhard Schroeder, long a friend of Putin.

On Nord Stream 2, which she approved after Russia’s 2014 ­annexation of Crimea, she argues that at the time it would have been “difficult to get companies and gas users in Germany and in many EU member states to accept” having to import more expensive liquefied natural gas from other sources.

Dr Merkel says the gas was needed as a transitional energy source as Germany was pursuing a switch to renewable energy.

On nuclear power, she ­argues that “we do not need it to meet our climate goals”.

AFP