For Merkel, Trump is “fascinated” by autocrats

Trump, Putin, her youth in the GDR: Angela Merkel, German chancellor between 2005 and 2021, looks back on her journey in her memoir entitled “Freedom” to be published next Tuesday.

The German weekly “Die Zeit” published preview extracts on Thursday, including the following passages:

About her first meeting with the American president at the White House, in March 2017, which did not leave her with “a good feeling,” she writes: “We were on two different levels. Trump was emotional, I was factual. When he paid attention to my arguments, it was generally to reproach them again. A solution to the problems raised did not seem to be his goal. (…) I concluded from my talks: cooperation for an interconnected world would not be possible with Trump.”

“The Russian president apparently fascinated him a lot. In the following years, I had the impression that leaders with autocratic and dictatorial tendencies exerted a certain fascination on him.

In June 2017, Trump announced to Merkel on the phone that the United States was going to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, “a hard blow” for the one who wanted to make the climate “a central subject” of the G20.

Regarding her opposition to Ukraine’s accession to NATO – which she has long been criticized for – she explains, returning to the alliance summit in 2008 in Bucharest.

The presence of the Russian Black Sea Fleet on the Ukrainian Crimean peninsula presented risks, she said: “Until now, none of the countries applying for NATO membership had experienced such interweaving with the Russian military structures.

“I considered it illusory to think that candidate status would have protected Ukraine (and Georgia) from Putin’s aggression.”

At the end of the summit, a compromise “which had a price” was found.

“The fact that Georgia and Ukraine were not promised candidate status was a ‘no’ to their hopes. The fact that NATO at the same time gave them a glimpse of a general promise of membership was for Putin a “yes” to membership (…) a declaration of war.”

“I returned from Bucharest with mixed feelings. We had avoided a big argument but at the same time it had become clear that we, within NATO, did not have a common strategy vis-à-vis Russia.

“Later, in another context (…) Vladimir Putin told me: “you will not remain chancellor for eternity and then they (Ukraine and Georgia, editor’s note) will become members of NATO . And I want to prevent that.”

“And I thought: You’re not president forever either. However, my concern about future tensions with Russia did not diminish in Bucharest.

Angela Merkel remembers a “happy childhood” in Templin, a small town in the former communist GDR, north of Berlin.

His father, a pastor from Hamburg in the west, directed a theology training seminar with the aim of countering the shortage of clergy under a regime hostile to religion.

“My parents did everything they could to create protective spaces for me and my brothers and sisters (…) I will always be grateful to them.”

“Living under a dictatorship meant “living permanently on the razor’s edge. Even if a day started carelessly, everything could change in a few seconds if political boundaries were transgressed, putting our lives in danger.

“Finding where exactly those limits were was the true art of living. My conciliatory character to a certain extent and my pragmatic approach helped me.

But not always. Like the day at university when student Angela Merkel was caught doing physics exercises, the subject of her studies, instead of listening to a compulsory general course on Marxism-Leninism.

The professor ordered her to leave the amphitheater: “I had to go all the way down the stairs to the bottom. A dead silence reigned in the room. Once outside, “I noticed my knees were shaking.” If the episode had no consequences, she never forgot it: “It was humiliating.”

Looking back, she feels a “kind of superiority” in the face of this regime. “Because this State has not succeeded, despite everything, in depriving me of something that made me live and feel: a certain carefreeness.”