Former Chancellor Angela Merkel made a self-critical assessment of her own policies for the first time in connection with the Ukraine war. In an interview with the weekly newspaper The time she said, “we too should have reacted more quickly to Russia’s aggressiveness. Germany has not reached the two percent target despite the increase. And I didn’t give a passionate speech about it every day either”. Merkel was referring to the increase in the defense budget, about which there was a dispute with her coalition partner SPD during her term in office. She expressly emphasized that the Union was the only one to have included NATO’s growth target in its program. At the same time, “we haven’t done enough to deter through higher defense spending,” said the ex-Chancellor time-Interview.
Merkel has been under public pressure for some time to explain her policy towards Russia in light of the war. This raises the question of whether Germany was too lenient with Russia during her chancellorship and whether there were ways to dissuade President Vladimir Putin from invading the neighboring country. Above all, Ukraine has accused Merkel of using her veto in 2008 to prevent the country from being included in the NATO partnership program and of allowing closeness and dependence on Russia through the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
Merkel asks for alternatives
Merkel now deals with the criticism, but uses a much more detailed passage to defend her decisions. “I come to the conclusion that I made my decision at the time in a way that I can understand today. It was an attempt to prevent exactly such a war. The fact that it did not succeed does not mean that the attempts were therefore wrong.”
In a manner typical of her, Merkel demands that alternatives to the decisions she made at the time be considered. From the perspective of 2008, Ukraine’s entry into NATO was wrong, the country did not have the prerequisites for it. She called the 2014 Minsk peace agreement after Russia occupied Crimea and Donbass an “attempt to give Ukraine time.” The Ukraine of 2014/15 is not the Ukraine of today, the country has become stronger, and the NATO states were also less able to help Kyiv then than they are doing today.
To justify the Nord Stream decision, Merkel uses well-known arguments: the pipeline was built privately, and construction should have been explicitly banned by law. “In my view, such a refusal in combination with the Minsk Agreement (would have) dangerously worsened the climate with Russia.” In addition, Germany has become dependent on Russia in terms of energy policy because other suppliers such as the Netherlands or Great Britain have reduced their deliveries.
Merkel stressed that she considered it “cheap” to bow to the critics’ arguments “just because it is expected”. Just to have her peace, she won’t say, “Oh, that’s right, now I see it too, that was wrong.” Merkel recently had this mirror said that at the end of her term in office she was too weak politically to assert herself against Putin. She wants to draw up her own assessment of the chancellorship in a book that is to be published in 2024. About the excitement about her role, she says “that today political decisions of the past are judged very quickly without recalling the context and critically examining alternatives”.