Angela Merkel, who last month published her memoirs on her 16 years as German chancellor, was a great tactician. But she was dead wrong on many of the strategic questions hurled at Germany during her time in charge. Merkel is the architect of a Germany that’s again the sick man of Europe, now in a second year with a shrinking economy and surging parties on the far-right and far-left.
Merkel doesn’t do mea culpas and this has annoyed some reviewers of her book. Those who hoped for admission of failures misunderstand Merkel. She’s a physicist, who disassembles problems before making, what she sees, as fact-based decisions. Her manner of deflecting mistakes is always the same: based on the information at the time my decision was correct.
Merkel prioritised dealing with Moscow over the unruly Eastern Europeans
Merkel left behind no signature achievement. She wasn’t a Helmut Kohl with German reunification or Willy Brandt whose Ostpolitik normalised ties with the East Bloc. Instead, she was reactive, responding to crises such as the euro-debt meltdown, the 2015 migration crisis and Covid.
Merkel’s legacy is that her decisions were mostly mediocre, while many were misguided or even abysmal. She studiously avoided tough economic and social welfare reforms to pander to voters eager for welfare goodies or subsidies. Even worse, she chipped away at earlier reforms by her Social Democratic predecessor, Gerhard Schröder, as she profited mightily from the growth they triggered. Real leadership this was not.
So legendary was she at dithering that her name became a neologism: To “Merkeln” means to avoid, delay or put off.
Merkel is at her least convincing in writing about Ukraine. She describes in granular detail how she blocked US president George W. Bush’s bid to put Ukraine and Georgia on track to join Nato by giving them Membership Action Plan (MAP) status at a 2008 alliance summit in Bucharest.
Her first excuse for keeping Ukraine out is that new Nato members should not only enjoy greater security but should also enhance the security of the entire alliance. Well, using this argument, a disarmed West Germany – a divided nation with territorial claims in Poland and the USSR – should have been blocked from joining Nato in 1955.
She then warns that given the Ukrainian-Russian treaty, under which Moscow based its Black Sea fleet at the Sevastopol Naval Base in Crimea, Ukrainian Nato membership would have marked the first time Russian forces were stationed in a new alliance member. This is ingenuous at best: Soviet and then Russian troops remained in former East Germany after the 1990 reunification until 1994. West German officers immediately took command of the ex-East German National People’s Army which was dissolved and became part of the Bundeswehr. German and Soviet/Russian armed forces were sometimes based only a few miles apart.
Finally, Merkel says she is convinced it’s “an illusion” to think that giving Ukraine and Georgia a formal Nato pathway would have deterred Russian president Vladimir Putin. Nobody but the man in the Kremlin can answer this question. Still, Putin invaded Georgia just four months later and started the Ukraine war by annexing Crimea in 2014.
While preaching diplomacy to Ukrainians to end the war, Merkel never seems to have thought about beefing up the outgunned Ukrainian forces. On the contrary, after president Barack Obama said the United States would send defensive weapons to Kyiv, Merkel writes: “I did express my concern that any arms delivery would strengthen those forces in the Ukrainian government that were hoping for a military solution alone…”
So legendary was she at dithering that her name became a neologism: To “Merkeln” means to avoid
Despite growing up in the East Bloc, Merkel evinces little sympathy for the Russia fears of her brothers and sisters in the formerly Soviet-run countries:
“Many Central and Eastern Europeans had little motivation to invest in relations with Russia at all. They seemed to wish that the country would simply disappear, that it did not exist.”
Merkel, it would seem, prioritised dealing with Moscow over the unruly Central and Eastern Europeans. This hints at one of Germany’s diplomatic errors since 1990: accepting Russia’s insistence that it be given preferential and separate treatment than other states that emerged from the former Soviet Union.
The 736-page memoirs could have used a good editor. The book should be at least one-third shorter. It is packed with banal details like the names of unknown bureaucrats, exact times of arrival and departure, the names of hotels Merkel stayed at or restaurants she dined in. If there were juicy details about recording devices in the rooms, mice behind the toilet or appalling food or service, sure, put this in. But Merkel doesn’t do gossipy anecdotes, let alone snark.
Merkel admits that her opening of Germany’s borders to tens of thousands of refugees and migrants from Syria, Lebanon, Afghanistan, the Balkans and Africa in September 2015 was a turning point of her years in office because it was and remains bitterly divisive. She says there was no alternative and then wraps herself in legalistic arguments. Merkel then lists a series of attacks carried out by migrants including the December 19, 2016, truck attack by a Tunisian Islamist on a Berlin Christmas market that killed 13 people.
She also notes the mass sexual assaults on New Year’s Eve 2015-2016 in Cologne “apparently by hundreds of men aged 18 to 35 of north African or Arab origin.” Oddly, nowhere in this passage does she express any kind of horror, outrage, let alone contrition over the attacks. Instead, she complains that an initial police report of only minor incidents during the outdoor New Year’s festivities was “particularly devastating because it gave the impression that the state authorities wanted to cover something up.”
Merkel doesn’t do gossipy anecdotes, let alone snark
Merkel doesn’t mention that parts of cities like Berlin have become dangerous for people who are openly Jewish or gay. No less than Berlin’s police president, Barbara Slowik, last month warned: There are “certain neighbourhoods in which the majority of people are of Arab descent, who also have sympathies for terrorist groups.” There, “open anti-Semitism” occurs. “There are areas – and we have to be honest about this – where I would advise people who wear a kippah or are openly gay or lesbian to be more careful.” Think about this: in the city the Nazis cleansed of Jews and where they held the Wannsee Conference to plot the murder of all Jews in Europe, the police chief is warning Jews that parts of Berlin are too dangerous for them to visit.
Germany’s open borders and the officially documented rise in crime carried out by non-Germans triggered the resurrection of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. Originally set up as an anti-euro party it was languishing. By pivoting to target migrants it saw a massive rise in support. The AfD is now Germany’s second strongest party, according to national opinion polls. In September, it won state elections in eastern Thuringia state and came in a strong second in eastern Saxony and Brandenburg.
Merkel’s migration policies and the fact that she shoved her conservative Christian Democrats both to the left and towards the Greens are reasons for the AfD’s surge. Some Christian Democrats felt politically homeless; a widely-viewed film of Merkel yanking a German flag out of the hand of her CDU general secretary and throwing it away at a party celebrating her 2013 election victory was a symbol of this break. But she has little to say about any of this, or the rise of the AfD in her memoirs.
The Energiewende, or energy transformation, is another area where Merkel has left behind wreckage. After the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster in Japan in 2011, it took her only three months to rush through a plan to close all of Germany’s nuclear power plants by 2022. These plants, at their peak, provided more than 30 per cent of German electricity. At the same time, coal-fired plants are also slated to shut down.
This, combined with surcharges for building renewables, means Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, has the fourth highest electricity prices in EU. Energy prices are a prime reason given by industries for shuttering operations in Germany and moving to the U.S. Merkel remains adamantly opposed to calls within her own CDU to restart nuclear reactors. Germany must stay nuclear-free “to encourage other countries in the world,” she says. Really? Germany’s energy transformation is rather seen around the world as how not to do it.
Merkel defends her role in the Nord Stream I and II natural gas pipeline debacle. It was purely a business deal because piped Russian gas was far cheaper than LNG brought to Germany by ships would have been, she says. By 2019, Germany was getting almost 50 per cent of its natural gas imports from Russia.
True, it was Chancellor Schröder who signed off in 2005 on Nord Stream I, running from Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea. But this was well before Putin invaded Georgia, annexed Crimea and launched his invasion of Ukraine.
Merkel’s role is far more controversial: she allowed German companies to sign up for the Nord Stream II pipeline in 2015, one year after Putin grabbed Crimea and invaded Ukraine’s Donbas region. Merkel insists it would have been difficult if not impossible to win political acceptance for reducing cheap Russian gas both from industry and private gas customers in Germany and the EU. It only became possible after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, she claims.
The Bundeswehr still can’t even defend Germany, let alone any bits of the rest of Nato
In the end there was no choice, Nord Stream II never went into operation and three of the four pipelines from Nord Stream I and II became inoperable after being hit by underwater explosions in September 2022.
Oh, and what about producing domestic natural gas in Germany using fracking? No luck. Fracking was banned under Chancellor Merkel in 2017.
The ruin of Germany’s armed forces, the Bundeswehr, is a signature event that continued under Merkel’s watch. During her final eight years in office, after Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine, or after Donald Trump’s first term, she should have launched a massive rebuilding of the military. It didn’t happen and the Bundeswehr still can’t even defend Germany, let alone any bits of the rest of Nato.
Merkel preferred to spend money on butter and not guns, though in her book she puts the blame on her coalition partners; she claims that only her Christian Democrats wanted to meet Nato’s 2 per cent of GDP military spending target. But this was never a Merkel priority; and in her final year in office military spending only reached 1.5 per cent of GDP. Security was simply outsourced to the U.S. This is the most egregious and dangerous part of her legacy as Donald Trump returns to power and Vladimir Putin’s appetite grows.
Merkel preferred to spend money on butter and not guns
Merkel’s other own goal is a ballooning bureaucracy, despite her vows to cut red tape. Since 2016, there’s been a 22 per cent increase in the number of employees in the chancellery and federal ministries. Indeed, the chancellery now has to expand and is getting a new building, officially priced at 800 million euros (£660 million), which will make it seven times bigger than the White House.
During Merkel’s time in office, most German and international media wrote about her in a fawning manner bordering on hagiographical fiction. Memoirs, of course, have this in them. (The ideal title for many such chronicles would be: I was Right you Stupid Fools!) But Chancellor Merkel’s account is especially bloodless, emotionless, lacking in humor and void of even the slightest self-criticism.
The story of her 16 years at Germany’s helm could have been a great read. This book is not.
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