She continues to stand by her asylum policy and euro rescue

After her fourth and final term in office, things had become quiet about former German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Most recently, the Christian Democratic politician even left the party-affiliated Konrad Adenauer Foundation. It was said that she wanted to shape her new life freely, without any political constraints.

But now she is appearing again as a politician. With her political biography “Freedom,” published on Tuesday by Kiepenheuer & Witsch, she wants to regain the authority to interpret her long time in the Chancellery.

This also involves such serious decisions as the failure to close the border during the asylum crisis in 2015. Merkel still does not want to understand the political controversy surrounding this time. This can be shown particularly clearly in one example: the way she looks back on her dictum “We can do it”.

“We can do it”: Merkel doesn’t understand the criticism

The sentence was made in August 2015 when the first public doubts arose as to whether Germany could actually accept over a million asylum migrants – mainly Syrians. Merkel writes: “If someone had told me back then that ‘We can do it’, these three banal words, would later be held against me for weeks, months, years, and by some to this day, I would have looked in disbelief and asked: Excuse me?”

She commented similarly on a photo she took with a refugee. She wrote that she had “not the slightest idea” of “what waves this picture and other selfies would cause.” The basic tone of the book: She, the former Chancellor, always acted objectively in the interests of Germany and Europe. Others are responsible for the political polarization.

Merkel’s election campaign strategy was described at the time as “asymmetrical demobilization”. There is a simple concept behind the cumbersome term: those who follow this strategy avoid controversial statements. As far as possible, he even integrates the opponent’s concepts into his own program.

As a result, the parties in the political center became increasingly similar to one another. Some potential voters from the SPD and the Greens stayed at home on election day – or they voted for Merkel straight away.

Merkel’s “lack of alternatives” gave the AfD its name

Martin Schulz, the hapless Social Democratic candidate for chancellor in the 2017 parliamentary election, spoke of an “attack on democracy” that Merkel’s party was guilty of. In fact, Merkel’s demobilization tactics not only weakened the Social Democrats, but also strengthened the AfD.

The Alternative for Germany was founded in 2013 as a response to Merkel’s dogma that there was “no alternative” to saving the euro in the wake of the financial crisis. “The party founders rejected my government’s policy of stabilizing the euro,” writes Merkel. “I, on the other hand, was proud that we had managed to save the euro.” With her re-election she felt that her course had been confirmed, she tells the reader. The protest by the AfD, whose founders included several economically liberal ex-CDU politicians, apparently didn’t bother them much.

If you talk to prominent politicians from the CDU and CSU today, hardly anyone wants to be quoted making statements about the former Chancellor’s political legacy. The CDU under the new chairman Friedrich Merz has now moved away from Merkel’s center-left orientation and has adjusted its course back to the center in areas such as asylum and energy policy. But the Merkel years weighed heavily on the CDU and CSU union. Many voters don’t buy her current change of course.

Former Chancellor wants to reform the debt brake

Merkel is now advising the center parties not to talk “constantly” about the AfD’s issues, especially in migration policy, in which the right-wing party is calling for a stop to accepting asylum seekers and rejections at the border. You can’t keep the AfD down by outdoing it “even rhetorically” – “without offering actual solutions to existing problems.”

Merkel is proposing a solution to at least one of the current problems: she is calling for a reform of the debt brake, which only allows the German state to take on a small amount of new debt. From the critics’ point of view, it prevents the state from taking out loans to renew the ailing public infrastructure. That’s how Merkel sees it today, adding that it’s also about “avoiding distribution struggles in society.”

The debt brake is a legacy of Merkel’s time in government: in 2009, when the debt brake was incorporated into the constitution, the Union governed together with the SPD. At the time, the government argued that the new constitutional instrument would secure the financial future of future generations.

She still thinks Nord Stream 2 is right

And there is apparently a topic that makes Merkel extremely irritated. Since the major Russian attack on Ukraine in February 2022, she has been accused “more strongly than ever” of having “led Germany into an irresponsible dependence on Russian gas,” she writes.

Her predecessor Gerhard Schröder signed the contract to build the Nord Stream pipeline in 2005, which opened six years later. Merkel then advocated the construction of a second line – Nord Stream 2.

Nord Stream 1 transported Russian gas through the Baltic Sea to Germany, bypassing Ukraine and other Eastern European transit countries. In August 2022, Russia completely shut down the active line. Finally, an explosion destroyed the two strands of Nord Stream 1 and one strand of Nord Stream 2.

The nuclear phase-out was primarily politically motivated

Why did Merkel have the line built? Germany needed Russian gas “as a fossil bridge technology” because of the phase-out of nuclear energy, she writes. Namely, “until renewable energies could completely take over the energy supply”.

Because in 2011 it wasn’t just Nord Stream that was opened. Merkel also confirmed the decision to phase out nuclear power made by the previous government under Schröder. She justified this at the time with the nuclear accident in Fukushima, Japan.

But in her memoirs the situation at the time sounds different. After the accident in Japan, she wrote, what she feared above all was the “disputes with opponents of nuclear power.” So it was less objective than political reasons that motivated them to phase out nuclear power.

Merkel sees no shared responsibility for the war in Ukraine

Merkel goes into particular detail about the Minsk Agreement of 2015, which she helped negotiate. It was intended to secure a ceasefire in eastern Ukraine after Russia-backed separatists declared two “people’s republics” there. But they did not adhere to the regulations. Instead, they repeatedly attacked Ukrainian towns.

Critics accuse Merkel of not sufficiently deterring Russia with the weak agreement. In addition, Germany has made itself even more dependent on Russia with the construction of the Nord Stream lines. This encouraged the Kremlin to launch a major attack on Ukraine.

But Merkel sees responsibility for the outbreak of war solely with Putin. During the pandemic, he isolated himself more and more and was no longer available for meetings.

Merkel does not answer the question of whether her energy and foreign policy could have contributed to the outbreak of war. She doesn’t even ask herself.

The pandemic infuriated them

In the chapter on the Covid pandemic, Merkel becomes emotional. There are sentences there that are unusual for the ex-Chancellor: “Inside I was desperate,” “Inside I was seething.”

Merkel’s narrative: She herself took the warnings of virologists seriously and acted responsibly, while some prime ministers of the German federal states were always looking for a fly in the ointment and were keen to weaken tough lockdown measures. The solution from Merkel’s point of view: the so-called federal emergency brake to standardize the measures in Germany.

It is hardly surprising that Merkel advocates toughness in epidemic policy. But your warm words about the German Corona app are astonishing. This app was almost useless in practice, primarily because of the major data protection concerns surrounding contact tracing, but it cost the state more than 200 million euros.

Dark words about Donald Trump

Merkel hardly admits any mistakes in her book. One of the few exceptions is a passage in which she refers to her guest article in the Washington Post. In 2003, as head of the Christian Democrats, she criticized then-Chancellor Schröder for his skeptical stance on the second Iraq war. She writes that it was not right “as a German politician (. . .) to attack my own head of government head-on abroad.”

Good relations with the USA, but especially with China, were very important to Merkel for economic reasons. About her relationship with China’s Prime Minister Xi Jinping, she writes that her “Marxist-Leninist knowledge” enabled her to ask him precise questions about the Chinese Communist Party. When it comes to human rights, people are far apart – Merkel explains her China-friendly course as an “example of realpolitik”.

Merkel’s judgment of the former and future US President Donald Trump is harsher. She describes him as a selfish utility maximizer. This mentality comes from his time as a real estate entrepreneur. Their conclusion: “Working together for a networked world” is actually impossible with Trump.

Regarding NATO’s unfortunate Afghanistan mission with German participation, Merkel writes with maximum sobriety that the goals were set too high. Merkel also remains vague on another point in her foreign policy balance sheet. In 2008, she said in the Israeli parliament that Israel’s security was part of Germany’s raison d’etre. To this day, no one can say exactly what this means. Merkel goes into the “reason of state” for a good five pages, but sheds little light on the matter.

Migration: the special route as optimal?

When it comes to her asylum policy, Merkel always brings up the night of September 4th to 5th, 2015, when she decided to allow asylum migrants from the Arab region who were staying in Hungary to enter Germany. “From today’s perspective, it is difficult to understand why the decision was so controversial at the time,” she writes. The ex-Chancellor fails to recognize that this decision triggered a domino effect, as around 2.5 million asylum seekers came to Germany in the following months and years.

A few months after Merkel’s decision, numerous North Africans and Arabs harassed hundreds of young women in Cologne on New Year’s Eve 2015. More than 500 sexual offenses were reported. After that, the mood among the German population gradually began to change. The so-called welcoming culture gave way to skepticism. Merkel describes New Year’s Eve in a short paragraph. The first woman in the Chancellery finds no words of empathy for the many young women who were harassed, abused and, in some cases, traumatized that night.

In her book, Merkel also accurately describes several Islamist terrorist attacks that occurred in Germany in 2016 and were obviously linked to the open borders policy. Why she still considers her migration policy to be correct to this day remains largely unclear. The book states succinctly that the values ​​of democracy are stronger than terrorism. For a politician who made her career in a bourgeois party, her stance on the issue of migration is unusual.

This fits in with an interview with the magazine “Der Spiegel”, in which Merkel was recently asked whether, in her view, integration was, not least, an obligation on the part of the host country. Merkel affirmed this and called for a “willingness to change,” which is crucial for integration.