German ex-leader makes a sharp distinction between Obama and Trump in new memoir

BERLIN (AP) — Former German chancellor Angela Merkel recalls Vladimir Putin’s “power plays” over the years, recalls contrasting encounters with Barack Obama and Donald Trump and says she wondered if she could have done more to prevent Brexit, in her memoirs published Tuesday.

The 70-year-old Merkel appears to have no significant doubts about the most important decisions of her sixteen years as German leader. big challenges include the global financial crisis, the European debt crisis, the 2015-2016 refugee influx and the COVID-19 pandemic. True to form, her book – entitled ‘Freedom’ – offers a matter-of-fact account of her early life in communist East Germany and her later career in politics, peppered with moments of dry humor.

Merkel served alongside four American presidentsfour French presidents and five British prime ministers. But it is perhaps her interactions with Russian President Putin that have attracted the most attention since she left office at the end of 2021.

Merkel recalls that Putin made her wait for the Group of Eight summit she organized in 2007 – “if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s unpunctuality.” And she tells of a visit to the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi that year, where Putin’s Labrador appeared at a photo opportunity, even though Putin knew she was afraid of dogs.

Putin seemed to enjoy the situation, she wrote, but she did not bring it up – as she often did under the motto ‘never explain, never complain’.

The year before, she tells how Putin pointed to wooden houses in Siberia and told her that poor people lived there who could be “easily seduced,” and that similar groups had been encouraged by US government money to participate The Ukrainian “Orange Revolution” of 2004 against attempts at election fraud. Putin, she says, added: “I will never allow such a thing in Russia.”

Merkel says she was irritated by Putin’s “self-righteousness” in a 2007 speech in Munich in which he turned away from previous attempts to develop closer ties with the US. She said Putin’s appearance showed him as she knew him, “as someone who was always on guard not to be mistreated and who was ready to spend at any time, including power plays.” with a dog and other people waiting for him.

“You might find this all childish and reprehensible, you might shake your head at it – but that hasn’t made Russia disappear from the map,” she writes.

As she has done before, Merkel defends the much-criticized 2015 peace deal for eastern Ukraine, which she helped broker and her government’s decisions to purchase large quantities of oil natural gas from Russia. And she argues that it was right to maintain diplomatic and trade ties with Moscow until she left power.

Merkel concluded after the first meeting with the then senator. Obama in 2008 that they could work well together. More than eight years later, during his last visit as president in November 2016, she was one of the people with whom she discussed whether she would run for a fourth term.

Obama, she says, asked questions but held back with an opinion, and that in itself was useful. He “said that Europe can still use me very well, but that in the end I have to follow my feelings,” she writes.

There was no such warmth from Trump, who had criticized Merkel and Germany in his 2016 campaign. Merkel said she had to look for an “adequate relationship… without responding to all provocations.”

That was the case in March 2017 an awkward moment when Merkel first visited Trump’s White House. Photographers shouted “handshake!” and Merkel quietly asked Trump: “Would you like to have a handshake?” There was no response from Trump, who looked ahead with folded hands.

Merkel criticizes her own response. “He wanted to create a topic of conversation with his behavior, while I pretended that I was dealing with a conversation partner who behaved normally,” she writes. She adds that Putin apparently “fascinated” Trump and that in the following years she had the impression that “politicians with autocratic and dictatorial tendencies” seduced him.

Could Brexit have been prevented?

Merkel says she tried to help then-Prime Minister David Cameron in the European Union when he was under pressure from British Eurosceptics, but there were limits to what she could do. And pointing to Cameron’s efforts over the years to calm EU opponents, she says the road to Brexit is a textbook example of what can result from a miscalculation.

After British voted to leave the EU In 2016, an outcome she calls a “humiliation” for the other members, she says the question of whether she should have made more concessions to Britain “tortured me.”

“I came to the conclusion that, given the political developments in the country at the time, there would have been no acceptable option for me to prevent Britain’s exit from the European Union from outside,” Merkel said.

Merkel was the first German chancellor to leave power at a time of her choosing. She announced in 2018 that she would not seek a fifth term, saying she “let go at the right time.”

She points to three incidents from 2019 in which her body shook during public appearances as evidence. Merkel says she has had herself thoroughly examined and there are no neurological or other findings. An osteopath told her that her body was releasing the tension it had built up over the years, she adds.

“Freedom” runs to more than 700 pages in the original German edition, published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch. The English edition is being released simultaneously by St. Martin’s Press.