Refugees, energy, Russia… Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel regrets nothing and defends her record in her memoirs

The 70-year-old former chancellor is now being accused of having left Germany dangerously dependent on cheap Russian gas and of having contributed to the rise of the far right.

The return of Angela Merkel. The former German chancellor fiercely defends the sixteen years she spent at the head of Europe’s largest economy in her memoirs entitled Freedompublished Tuesday November 26 in around thirty countries. Absent from the political debate since she left power at the end of 2021, Angela Merkel is speaking again at a time when the news is marked by the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, the upcoming return of Donald Trump and the electoral campaign in Germany in view of early legislative elections in February.

At 70, she is today accused of having left Germany dangerously dependent on cheap Russian gas and of having contributed to the rise of the far right. She has never been so attacked as over her management of the migration crisis, where she ordered not to turn back refugees arriving at the country’s borders in September 2015. Explain her motivations at the time, her “vision of Europe and globalization” pushed her to write these memoirs, she says in the work published in France by Albin Michel.

By uttering a landmark sentence, “We will get there” (“We make it”), she exposed “an attitude” : “Where there are obstacles, we must work to overcome them”she still assures today. In the book, she states “still don’t understand” about a selfie with a Syrian refugee “that it could have been supposed that a kind face in a photo would be enough to incite entire legions to flee their homeland.”

On the rise of the German far-right AfD group, she warns democratic parties: if they “believe they will succeed in containing the progression of the AfD by relentlessly continuing to seize its themes, or even by rhetorical one-upmanship without proposing concrete solutions to existing problems, they will fail”.

Since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he has also criticized it for making Germany dependent on Russian gas deliveries. However, she points out, the creation of the Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline had been signed by her predecessor, the social democrat Gerhard Schröder, who subsequently became president of the shareholders’ committee and the supervisory board of this company.

No other leader is criticized as much in this memoir as Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom she describes as “a man perpetually on the lookout, afraid of being mistreated and always ready to strike, including playing power games with a dog and keeping others waiting.”