Should London kneel before Angela Merkel? 

The Royal Festival Hall has been booked out next week for a talk by Angela Merkel to launch her memoir – Freiheit (“Freedom”) – about her 18 years as Chancellor of Germany. No other European leader in recent memory has enjoyed the quasi-canonisation of Sankt Angela among London’s political-media elites.

Unchallenging interviews on the BBC and in carefully selected papers roll out a media red carpet.  The number of London journalists, let alone editors, who can speak and read German or have lived and worked in Germany can be counted on the fingers of two hands. A noted exception being of course the editor-publisher of The Article . Foreign correspondents went weak at the knees as they wrote their heroine-worship books about the modest, moderate, plum-cake baker who has been the most powerful woman in Europe this century.

Merkel didn’t do war like Tony Blair.  She didn’t do social division and attacks on workers and the poor like Margaret Thatcher. She was pro-European like any French president, without disparaging America as occupants of the Elysée can’t help indulging themselves in. 

Yet both her country and her continent are now deeply unhappy, having been left unprepared for today’s challenges. St Angela bears a good deal of the responsibility for the problems Germany, the EU, and Britain face.

It was Merkel’s decision to let more than 1 million Syrian Muslims enter Germany in 2015, and her insistence other EU states should take a share of these migrants and asylum-seekers, that made immigration the top Brexit issue in Britain the following year.

Its impact was exemplified by the Leave campaign’s “Breaking Point” posters and leaflets, showing endless queues of Muslim migrants snaking through Balkan mountains in order to get to the EU. These images arrived in every home in Britain. 

Another example was Merkel’s  cruel and inhumane treatment of the Greeks, in order to preserve the investments of German banks. The corruption of Greek politicians by German firms after Greece joined the Euro was widely reported. It helped turn the British against a Brussels elite that would inflict such pain on a nation Britain is close to. Greek pensioners could not take more than 60 Euros a day from their bank accounts, as result of the punishment Merkel inflicted on the nation.

When Greek immigrant workers and students anywhere in Europe found out Merkel was appearing at an event, they held up posters of her with a Hitler moustache. Siemens was accused of paying 80 million Euros in bribes to win contracts in Greece, but once back in Germany Merkel protected them.

In her memoirs she also blames the Blair government for “not introducing restrictions on eastern European workers once 10 new countries joined the bloc in May 2004”. This is hypocrisy of a high order. Merkel became Chancellor in 2005. She inherited the “ Zuwanderunggesetz ” (Immigration law), adopted in 2004 by the Social Democratic-Green government in Germany. This permitted German firms to hire any skilled workers they needed from the new EU member states. So while technically applying the 7-year transition period for full freedom of movement for new EU citizens, Merkel ensured that Germany could help itself to the best and brightest of skilled workers from the East if it suited German business.

Today Germany has 17 million people of immigrant origin. This is more than the entire population of the five East German Länder (states), where the far-Right AfD and the equally pro-Putin and anti-immigrant far-Left nationalists of Sahra Wagenknecht’s BSW are scoring highly in regional elections. Lecturing Britain for being too liberal on migration, having turned Germany into Europe’s biggest open-door immigration nation, is a very Merkelian form of double-speak.

British commentators have prostrated themselves in front of Merkel, writing hagiographic profiles and books on how wonderful a Chancellor she was. Yet she shut down non-CO2 emitting nuclear power and replaced it with Russian fossil fuel gas and oil, so left a dreadful legacy to Europe in terms of energy policy. 

She disliked Putin but refused to take any action against him, partly because Russia was a key market for German firms, especially luxury CO2 emitting automobiles.  She blocked mergers of German defence firms with European counterparts, including British companies. This prevented the emergence of an effective European-wide defence sector, producing arms on a partnership basis like Airbus. Nato is now paying the price for this.

Above all she did nothing to prepare her nation and the rest of Europe for the menace of Putin. She took over the Chancellorship in 2005 at the same time as the people of Ukraine rose up in the Orange Revolution against their oligarchs and political leaders who refused to defend Ukraine’s independence against the autocrat of the Kremlin. Yet Merkel did little or nothing to help the Ukrainian cause.

In 2008, she sat on her hands when Putin invaded Georgia by land, sea and air to teach the uppity Georgians that Russia remained their overlord. This invasion made a mockery of the nominal independence Georgians had assumed they now enjoyed after the end of the Soviet empire in 1990.

She spoke fluent Russian from her schooling in Soviet era East Germany and Putin had fluent German from his time as the KGB Resident in Dresden. Yet she refused to rearm Germany, even after Putin’s Anschluss with Crimea and the Donbas in 2014.

All that mattered were contracts for German firms. Business über Alles. The 16 million Germans who live in the former communist GDR still feel second-class citizens: “Ossis” (to use the disparaging term West Germans use for their poor relatives in the East).

Merkel was an Ossi but did little to bring jobs and investment to the East of the unified Germany. The Ossis’ response was to turn first to Die Linke (The Left), the left-over communist party from pre-1990 days. Then she let in more than a million Syrian Muslim immigrants and told much poorer countries in east and Central, East and South East nations they should take in a share of these migrants. They refused to obey her orders and East Germans turned to extremist anti-immigrant parties, as did more and more voters in Europe who rejected Merkel’s open-border policy towards asylum-seekers.

Germany had seemed vaccinated against xenophobic, racist and hate politics. Merkel’s clumsy handling of immigration showed Germany was no different from any other European country. The volume and velocity of arrivals of economic migrants and asylum seekers seemed out of control to many voters.

Merkel avoided the ugly language about Muslims and other migrants that entered the discourse of most other rightwing leaders in Europe. “ Wir schaffen das ” – “We can handle this” she proclaimed, as she refused to rethink German and EU open borders policies which were rejected by voters in most countries.

Today on Putin, immigration, and energy, the Merkel balance sheet shows that her 16 years of avoiding taking tough decisions have served her country and the Continent ill. Better than any British or Italian prime minister or French president, but the accurate biography of Angela Merkel remains to be written.

Denis MacShane is the former Minister of Europe. He wrote the first biography in English of France’s first socialist president, François Mitterrand. He has no plans to write a biography of Angela Merkel.

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