BERLIN – Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel recalls Vladimir Putin's “power games” over the years, remembers contrasting meetings with Barack Obama and Donald Trump and says she asked herself whether she could have done more to prevent Brexit, in her memoirs published Tuesday.
Merkel, 70, appears to have no significant doubts about the major decisions of her 16 years as German leader, whose major challenges included the global financial crisis, Europe’s debt crisis, the 2015-16 influx of refugees and the COVID-19 pandemic. True to form, her book — titled “Freedom” — offers a matter-of-fact account of her early life in communist East Germany and her later career in politics, laced with moments of dry wit.
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Merkel served alongside four U.S. presidents, four French presidents and five British prime ministers. But it is perhaps her dealings with Russian President Putin that have drawn the most scrutiny since she left office in late 2021.
Putin's power games
Merkel recalls being kept waiting by Putin at the Group of Eight summit she hosted in 2007 — “if there's one thing I can't stand, it's unpunctuality.” And she recounts a visit to the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi that year in which Putin's labrador appeared during a photo opportunity, although Putin knew she was afraid of dogs.
Putin appeared to enjoy the situation, she writes, and she didn't bring it up — keeping as she often did to the motto “never explain, never complain.”
The previous year, she recounts Putin pointing to wooden houses in Siberia and telling her poor people lived there who “could be easily seduced,” and that similar groups had been encouraged by money from the U.S. government to take part in Ukraine's “Orange Revolution” of 2004 against attempted election fraud. Putin, she says, added: “I will never allow something like that in Russia.”
Merkel says she was irritated by Putin's “self-righteousness” in a 2007 speech in Munich in which he turned away from earlier attempts to develop closer ties with the U.S. She said that appearance showed Putin as she knew him, “as someone who was always on guard against being treated badly and ready to give out at any time, including power games with a dog and making other people wait for him.”
“One could find this all childish and reprehensible, one could shake one's head over it — but that didn't make Russia disappear from the map,” she writes.
As she has before, Merkel defends a much-criticized 2015 peace deal for eastern Ukraine that she helped broker and her government's decisions to buy large quantities of natural gas from Russia. And she argues it was right to keep up diplomatic and trade ties with Moscow until she left power,
Obama and Trump
Merkel concluded after first meeting then-Sen. Obama in 2008 that they could work well together. More than eight years later, during his last visit as president in Nov. 2016, she was one of the people with whom she discussed whether to seek a fourth term.
Obama, she says, asked questions but held back with an opinion, and that in itself was helpful. He “said that Europe could still use me very well, but I should ultimately follow my feelings,” she writes.
There was no such warmth with Trump, who had criticized Merkel and Germany in his 2016 campaign. Merkel says she had to seek an “adequate relationship ... without reacting to all the provocations.”
In March 2017, there was an awkward moment when Merkel first visited the Trump White House. Photographers shouted “handshake!” and Merkel quietly asked Trump: “Do you want to have a handshake?” There was no response from Trump, who looked ahead with his hands clasped.
Merkel faults her own reaction. “He wanted to create a topic of discussion with his behavior, while I had acted as if I were dealing with an interlocutor behaving normally,” she writes. She adds that Putin apparently “fascinated” Trump and, in the following years, she had the impression that “politicians with autocratic and dictatorial traits” beguiled him.
Could Brexit have been avoided?
Merkel says she tried to help then-Prime Minister David Cameron in the European Union as he faced pressure from British Euroskeptics, but there were limits to what she could do. And, pointing to Cameron's efforts over the years to assuage opponents of the EU, she says the road to Brexit is a textbook example of what can arise from a miscalculation.
After Britons voted to leave the EU in 2016, an outcome she calls a “humiliation” for its other members, she says the question of whether she should have made more concessions to the U.K. “tortured me.”
“I came to the conclusion that, in view of the political developments inside the country at the time, there would have been no acceptable possibility for me to prevent Britain's way out of the European Union from outside,” Merkel says.
Giving up power
Merkel was the first German chancellor to leave power at a time of her choosing. She announced in 2018 that she wouldn't seek a fifth term, and says she “let go at the right point.”
She points to three 2019 incidents in which her body shook during public engagements as proof. Merkel says she had herself checked thoroughly and there were no neurological or other findings. An osteopath told her that her body was letting off the tension it had accumulated over years, she adds.
“Freedom” runs to more than 700 pages in its original German edition, published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch. The English edition is being released simultaneously by St. Martin's Press.