Six months after leaving office, ex-chancellor Angela Merkel finally has something in common with her predecessor: Russia. Like Gerhard Schröder, Germany’s four-term leader does not think she made any mistakes in her dealings with Moscow, nor does she see anything to apologise for.
That was the bottom line of her first public appearance last week at the Berliner Ensemble theatre in a one-woman evening that, as it progressed, became a Brechtian fable. When it comes to chutzpah, she still has nothing on Schröder.
On his way out of office in 2005 he signed off on the original undersea Nord Stream gas pipeline from Russia to Germany – then took a well-paid job on its supervisory board. Still clinging to that job today, and to his illusions about Vladimir Putin, Schröder has made himself a pariah in German society.
Merkel has not fallen that far but questions are growing. In June 2015, just 18 months after Russia annexed Crimea, she signed off on a second gas Nord Stream pipeline with Russia. Berlin’s unilateral energy policy infuriated and terrified Germany’s eastern neighbours and it was Olaf Scholz, Merkel’s successor, who pulled the plug last February on the completed pipeline.
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Onstage in Berlin, Merkel’s only half-concession was that “after Crimea we should have gone harder”. Merkel served a remarkable four terms because she understood what Germans wanted – the quiet life – and gave it to them. In an increasingly complex world with spiralling crises, she promised to insulate voters and ensure stability.
The flip side of what critics called her “sleeper wagon” approach is a huge reform backlog and unanswered questions about the future. Most urgently: how will Germany, come winter, heat all its homes or power its industrial machines?
The unresolved contradiction of Merkel’s Putin politics is why, aware like few others of his visceral, destructive hatred of the West, she took a softly-softly approach and increased German dependency. With broad backing at home she made a pragmatic, tactical, Brechtian choice: first we (h)eat, then we moralise.