She said she was currently in a “period of pupation”, trying to reinvent herself. On warning him, apparently half in jest, that he was on his way to becoming a sinister Shakespearean figure, Johnson went out of the room, returning five minutes later to tell her: “If that is the case, then I want to be Hamlet.” We had elections, there was always something going on with Greece at the time, and I broke my pelvic bone,” she said, referring to an injury incurred while on a cross-country skiing holiday in 2014.Īmong the anecdotes she relays in a wide-ranging interview in which she is reflective and sometimes gloomy about her time in office, are encounters with the Queen – though Merkel said she was never able to establish what the British monarch thought about Brexit – and a G7 meeting with Boris Johnson, who she said had been attempting to undermine the Northern Ireland protocol. “People write about 2013 and 14 as if I had had nothing else to concern myself with than the Minsk agreement, and ask: ‘How could you have taken your eye off Ukraine?’ But this is too simple. Merkel added it was unfair to suggest she had not paid Ukraine enough attention in 20. Having watched the Netflix drama Munich – the Edge of War, based on the Robert Harris novel, in which the actor Jeremy Irons plays Chamberlain, Merkel said she had been intrigued to see him portrayed in another, more positive light – “not as a fearful stirrup-holder for Hitler but as a strategist who used his country to create a buffer so that it could better prepare for German attack”. Merkel also appeared to be loosely comparing her behaviour to that of Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister associated with the flawed policy of appeasement towards Adolf Hitler by allowing him to expand the territory of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Her refusal to acknowledge her mistakes in allowing Germany to become ever more dependent on Russian gas supplies is another major criticism. But Merkel said the agreement had nevertheless helped buy Kyiv time to arm itself better against the Russian military.Īccording to Osang, she repeatedly implied that she felt misunderstood over what she had tried to achieve as German leader, facing as she now does a barrage of accusations over some of her choices, such as her decision to block Ukraine’s admission to Nato in Bucharest in 2008, seen by many as having harmed its ability to defend itself. Key points of the Minsk peace talks, including disarmament and supervision by an international body, were never followed through. In her interviews with Alexander Osang, which took place over a period of a year and in various locations, Merkel insisted that her stance on the Minsk agreement – which brought a ceasefire after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula – had been right. “Had I been standing again in the September I’d have kept drilling down, but … at my final meeting in Moscow, the feeling was clear: from a political power point of view, you’re finished. “I no longer had the power to push my ideas through because everyone knew ‘she’ll be gone by autumn’,” she said, describing how she had tried to establish a round of European talks after a meeting in the summer of 2021 between the US president, Joe Biden, and Putin. In an interview with the German news magazine Spiegel, Merkel said she felt acutely aware that her ability to negotiate with Putin was minimal, owing to the fact it was known she would not stand for a fifth term in office.
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