Summary
In her memoir Freedom, Angela Merkel reflects on her misjudgment of Donald Trump, initially treating him as “completely normal” before realizing his emotional nature and authoritarian inclinations.
She recounts his attempts to humiliate her, his zero-sum worldview, and fascination with autocratic leaders like Vladimir Putin.
Merkel also critiques Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accord and his hostility toward Germany.
Addressing her legacy, she discusses tensions with Putin over NATO and acknowledges criticism of her reliance on Russian gas and liberal refugee policies.
Lots of critical comments here. Can we just please applaud a politician who -I know, in huge retrospect- admits to her being wrong about something.
Would I rather have politicians who make no mistakes at all? Yes. I just dispise the amount of politicians who never ever own up to their mistakes and keep on vaguely blaming everyone but themselves. It was Trump that exarbated that method (though it had been in use much longer, he just went in more blatantly.)
Lets please celebrate boring, conscientious politicians that own up to their mistakes and instead hate on the ones that get off scott free by lying their asses off. That’d be great
She deserves the criticism, in 16 years she managed to pause time in Germany which is impressive but also created this illusion that that country can forever remain stuck in the 80s and everything will be fine by just doing things the way they have always been done.
That and maintaining the dependence on dictatorships for their energy infrastructure. And the absolutely vindictive policies against Greece which fucked the country badly.
She deserves respect for opening the borders to refugees, I applaud her for that and I wish there would have been more courageous politicians like her, but that doesn’t mean as a politician she was good for Europe in general.
Yup that’s fair. I don’t mean to say she’s above criticism. My point was that a politician able of introspection and able to even accept the concept of their own failure is delightful.
But that’s mainly criticism of all politicians in general than praise of her.
On that I couldn’t agree more with you. Politics have always been sad but imo nowadays our politicians aren’t only by and large bad people (nothing new here), but they’re also terribly incompetent with no visions, no values, but all the confidence in the world on the other hand…
This, we need to be more willing to forgive people when they say “I fucked up.”
Let’s be fair: “I was wrong about the bad nature of somebody else” is pretty much the lowest, mildest, weakest possible form of self-criticism there is, to the point that it’s quite common for posh manipulator types to use “I was wrong about your ,<proceeds to criticized the other person>” format of discourse to criticize others.