Angela Merkel discusses Putin’s “power games” in her memoirs

(Berlin) Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel remembers Vladimir Putin’s “power plays” over the years, his contrasting meetings with Barack Obama and Donald Trump and admits to having wondered if she could have done more to prevent Brexit, in his memoirs published Tuesday.

M^me Merkel, 70, appears to have no major doubts about the important decisions made during her 16 years at the helm of Germany, whose main challenges included the global financial crisis, the European debt crisis, the influx refugees in 2015-2016 and the COVID-19 pandemic. True to form, her book – titled Freedom – offers a factual account of his youth in communist East Germany and his later political career, peppered with moments of deadpan humor.

Angela Merkel has served alongside four US presidents, four French presidents and five British prime ministers, but it is perhaps her relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin that has received the most attention since she left office end of 2021.

Putin’s power games

Former chancellor recalls being forced to wait for Vladimir Putin at the G8 summit she hosted in 2007 — ‘if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s unpunctuality “. She also recounts a visit to the Russian resort of Sochi, near the Black Sea, that year, during which the Russian president’s labrador appeared during a photo shoot, although he knew she was afraid of dogs.

Vladimir Putin seemed to relish the situation, she wrote, and she didn’t talk about it — sticking as she often did to the motto “never explain, never complain.”

The year before, she mentioned that Mr. Putin had shown her wooden houses in Siberia and told her that poor people lived there who “could be easily seduced”, and that similar groups had been encouraged by the money of the American government to participate in the Ukrainian “Orange Revolution” of 2004 against attempts at electoral fraud. Mr. Putin, she said, added: “I will never allow such a thing in Russia.”

M^me Merkel said she was angered by the Russian president’s “self-righteousness” in a 2007 speech in Munich, in which he turned away from earlier attempts to develop closer ties with the United States. She said the appearance showed Vladimir Putin as she knew him, “as someone who was always on guard not to be treated badly and ready to let loose at any moment, including in power games with a dog and making the others wait. »

“One might find all this childish and reprehensible, one might be perplexed about it — but it has not made Russia disappear from the map,” she points out in her book.

As she has before, Angela Merkel defends a much-criticized 2015 peace deal for eastern Ukraine that she helped negotiate and her government’s decisions to buy large quantities of natural gas from Russia. She also argues that it was right to maintain diplomatic and commercial ties with Moscow until she left power.

Obama and Trump

M^me Merkel concluded after her first meeting in 2008 with Barack Obama that they could work well together. More than eight years later, during her last visit as US president, in November 2016, he was one of the people with whom she discussed the possibility of running for a fourth term.

Barack Obama, she said, asked questions, but showed restraint in expressing his opinion, which in itself was helpful. He “said that Europe could still use me very well, but that I ultimately had to follow my feelings,” she wrote.

There was no such heat with Donald Trump, who criticized M^me Merkel and Germany during her 2016 campaign. The former chancellor says she had to seek a “proper relationship […] without reacting to all provocations.”

In March 2017, there was an awkward moment during M’s first visit^me Merkel in the White House then occupied by Donald Trump. The photographers shouted “handshake!” and she asked Trump in a low voice, “Would you like a handshake?” » President Trump did not respond, looking ahead with his hands clasped.

Angela Merkel attacks her own reaction. “He wanted to create a topic of discussion with his behavior, whereas I had acted as if I were dealing with an interlocutor who was behaving normally,” she mentions in her memoirs. She adds that Vladimir Putin apparently “fascinated” Donald Trump and, in the years that followed, she felt that “politicians with autocratic and dictatorial traits” appealed to him.

Could Brexit have been avoided?

Angela Merkel says she tried to help then-Prime Minister David Cameron within the European Union (EU) when he was under pressure from British Eurosceptics, but there were limits to what she could do. ‘she could do. Highlighting Mr Cameron’s efforts over the years to appease opponents of the EU, she says the path to Brexit is a classic example of what can result from a miscalculation.

After Britons voted to leave the EU in 2016, a result she calls a “humiliation” for its other members, she says the question of whether she should have made more concessions to Britain l ‘tortured’. “I came to the conclusion that, given the political developments in the country at the time, there was no acceptable possibility for me to prevent Britain’s exit from the European Union by outside,” explains M.^me Merkel.

Give up power

Angela Merkel was the first German chancellor to leave power at a time of her choosing. She announced in 2018 that she would not seek a fifth term and said she “let go at the right time”.

She cites three incidents in 2019 in which her body shook during public engagements as proof. M^me Merkel explains that she had a thorough examination and that there were no neurological or other signs. An osteopath told her that her body was releasing the tension it had accumulated over the years, she adds.

Freedom has more than 700 pages in its original German edition, published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch. The French edition is published by Albin Michel.