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 to the White House and the electoral campaign in Germany with a view to early legislative elections in February.
“We make it”
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.
In uttering a landmark phrase – “We will get there” (“Wir schaffen das”) – she expounded “an attitude”: “Where there are obstacles, we must work to overcome them”. She says she “still doesn’t understand”, regarding a selfie with a Syrian refugee, “that we could suppose that a kind face in a photo would be enough to incite entire legions to flee their homeland”. While affirming that “Europe must always protect its external borders”, she emphasizes that “prosperity and the rule of law will always make Germany and Europe (…) places where we want to live. give back”.
On the rise of the German far-right AfD, she warns the democratic parties: if they “believe they can contain the progression of the AfD by continuing tirelessly to seize its themes, or even to rhetorical one-upmanship without proposing concrete solutions to existing problems, they will fail.”
Also read: 2015 migration crisis: Angela Merkel’s historic act rewarded in Geneva
Do not go back on nuclear power
Since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he has been criticized 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.
For Nord Stream 2, the second pipeline ever to enter service, to which she gave the green light well after the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, she explains that it would have been at the time “difficult to have so many accepted Germany (…) than in many EU member states” the import of other more expensive fuels.
It also justifies this choice by the gradual abandonment of nuclear power, which it had decided in 2011 in the wake of the Fukushima disaster: “natural gas fulfilled more than ever the function of a transitional fossil technology” while waiting for renewable energies are taking over.
She also recommends not going backwards on atomic energy in Germany, as some advocate: “We do not need it to meet our climate objectives, to be technologically efficient and in doing so to instill courage in ‘other countries.’
Vladimir Putin, “always ready to punch”
No other leader is as criticized 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 throw punches, including playing at exercising his power with a dog and making others wait.
However, she “continues to think” that “despite all the difficulties (…) she did well to have insisted (…) not to let contacts with Russia break (…) and also to preserve ties through commercial relations – beyond mutual economic benefits”. Because, she emphasizes, “Russia is, with the United States, one of the two main nuclear powers in the world” and it neighbors Europe.
She also still defends her opposition to Ukraine’s accession to NATO at the Bucharest summit in 2008, considering it illusory to think that candidate status would have protected her from Putin’s aggression.
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