Once one of Europe’s most respected political figures, Angela Merkel has a legacy that is under assault at present. Much of her recently released autobiography, Freedom, is largely an effort to defend herself from the criticisms of the decisions on difficult problems that she made while in office from 2005 to the end of 2021. The enterprise is a tortuous one and it will not settle the controversies.

Cinderella

The first part of the book is a beguiling Cinderella story of how someone who seemed fated to be an ordinary research scientist in the East German communist regime gets shunted onto a different path by the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany. This is a case where an historical turn opens up an unexpected path for an individual who is capable, possessed of a healthy ambition, and an ability to profit from accidents thrown in her way.

The first of these accidents she owed, ironically, to the Stasi, the notorious East German Intelligence Agency. While a minor member of a movement called Democratic Awakening that was born after the fall of the Wall and affiliated with West Germany’s Christian Democratic Party (CDU) during the early days of the reunification process, she was appointed, out of the blue almost, the group’s spokesperson by the party leader Wolfgang Schur. At the height of the political campaign for East Germany’s first free elections in 1990, Schur was exposed as having been a collaborator of the Stasi, which put an abrupt end to his political career. Among those left to pick up the pieces was Merkel, who helped negotiate her party’s integration into the CDU.

Several years later, having served as minister under Helmut Kohl and risen to the position of CDU Secretary General, Merkel’s drive to the very top was assisted by another scandal, the so-called donations scandal that put an end to Kohl’s leading role in the CDU and paved the way for Merkel’s becoming CDU chair and eventually Chancellor of Germany. In both cases, that of Schnur and Kohl, she was plucked from relative obscurity by powerful male figures that she then eventually replaced after they were disgraced. What comes through in her account is that pragmatism coupled with an ability to compromise is the formula that brings her to the top of what is otherwise an all-male hierarchy. What is missing or muted are the confrontations and maneuverings that are a necessary part of a relatively fast rise to the top of a party filled with strong-willed, ambitious individuals. Merkel is tough and calculating, but this is a side that is underplayed in this memoir.

Three big crises

One of the three key crises during her watch as Chancellor that Merkel addresses was the European financial crisis that began in 2009, which was partly caused by loose borrowing and lending practices involving German banks and Greece. Merkel has harsh words for the German banks, but she appears to have had little empathy for the Greeks who were, after all, subjected to tough austerity measures in return for billions of euros of so-called “rescue funds” that simply went to bail out the German banks. In his account of the negotiations with the Germans, Yannis Varoufakis, then Greek finance minister, writes that he and his Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras appealed to Merkel, to no avail, since she stood firmly behind her political ally, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schauble, who was determined to squeeze the Greeks.

The second major crisis that Merkel addresses was the push of refugees from the Middle East to get to Europe as a result of the Syrian political crisis. With over a million people on the march and being harassed in places like Hungary, Merkel made her fateful decision to admit them as refugees to Germany on Sept 4, 2015. It was Merkel’s finest hour, one she said she took for humanitarian reasons after being reminded of the plight of people from East Germany making their way to West Germany from Czechoslovakia in 1989. It was also a decision which many Germans are blaming for the rise of the far right anti-immigrant Alternativ fur Deutschland party (AfD), which has become the country’s second largest party.

The third crisis Merkel deals with is the one for which she has the most convoluted explanation. Stung by Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky’s comment that her vetoing Ukraine’s “Membership Action Plan” to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization at NATO’s 2008 summit in Bucharest was an act of appeasement that encouraged the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, she writes that she stands by her decision. Merkel’s position seems to be that there is no one event that can be said to be responsible for the Russian invasion. There is the complex relationship between the two countries that were once members of the same state, the Soviet Union, whose collapse left a lot of unresolved issues. There is Vladimir Putin’s resentment that Russia is being treated as a minor power and his desire to make it matter in a multipolar world. Then there is Putin's fear of NATO expansion to the borders of Russia. “I thought it was playing with fire to discuss MAP status for Ukraine and Georgia without analyzing the situation from Putin’s perspective,” she writes unrepentantly.

Perhaps owing to her growing up in East Germany—and knowing Russian—Merkel had, one must concede, a better grasp than most of her contemporaries of the different facets of the complex relationship that the West had with Putin, who has repeatedly said that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the “greatest geopolitical tragedy” of the 20th century.

Governing from the “extreme center”

Yet there is a fourth crisis that has shaken Germany but it is one that Merkel does not seem to recognize as a crisis. This is the neoliberal agenda that the CDU and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) jointly imposed on Germany. Merkel’s predecessor as Chancellor was the SPD’s Gerhard Schroeder, who, to the dismay of his working class base, weakened protections against dismissal, struck away many health insurance benefits, cut social security benefits, and tightened qualifications for unemployment compensation. Merkel and the CDU supported the so-called Hartz reforms of the SPD that reduced real wages and increased poverty and inequality. For most of the last 15 years, in fact, the CDU and SPD have been able to work together in “grand coalitions” because both have a neoliberal outlook. This is an alliance that analyst David Goessmann calls, following Tariq Ali, the “extreme center.”

Along with the perceived massive failure to address the migration issue, it is the pro-market agenda that has caused the desertion to the far right, particularly to the AfD, of a great number of the base of both parties. It is amazing that there is no recognition in Merkel’s memoir of the role of neoliberalism in bringing about the greatest crisis of Germany since the Second World War.

Whatever one's opinion of Angela Merkel, this is a must read to gain insight into the dominant figure of European politics in the last quarter of a century.