BERLIN: Angela Merkel sought advice from the pope on dealing with Donald Trump when he was first elected U.S. president, hoping to find ways of convincing a man she saw as having a property developer’s winner-or-loser mentality not to quit the Paris climate accords.
In her memoir, extracts of which were published in German weekly Die Zeit late on Wednesday evening, the long-serving German chancellor detailed her difficulties in dealing with Trump, who, she said, appeared to her fascinated by Russian President Vladimir Putin and other authoritarian leaders.
“He saw everything from the perspective of the property developer he was before entering politics,” she wrote. “Each parcel of land could only be sold once, and if he didn’t get it someone else did. That’s how he saw the world.”
Pope Francis, when Merkel asked him, in general terms, for advice on dealing with people “with fundamentally different views”, immediately understood she was referring to Trump and his desire to quit the climate accords, she wrote.
“Bend, bend, bend, but make sure it doesn’t break,” he told Merkel, according to her account.
When Trump first took office in 2017, Merkel was one of the world’s longest-serving elected leaders and the most influential in the European Union by far after having shaped Germany and the continent’s response to the euro zone debt crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s initial 2014 invasion of Ukraine.
As much of the world fretted over Trump’s presidency, Merkel’s unruffled demeanour and her frequent invocations of values like freedom and human rights led to some dubbing her the true “leader of the free world” - a moniker traditionally reserved for U.S. presidents.
Written before Trump’s reelection, the book expresses the “heartfelt hope” that Vice President Kamala Harris would defeat her rival.
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Her memoir, entitled “Freedom: Memories 1954-2021” will be published in more than 30 countries on Nov. 26. She will launch the book in the U.S. a week later at a Washington event with former President Barack Obama, with whom she forged a close political relationship.
Germany’s first female leader was still popular with voters at the end of 16 years in office, but her legacy has come under greater scrutiny, with some blaming the huge bets on Russian energy made by her governments for both Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and Germany’s current economic doldrums.
Merkel herself has expressed no regret about her Russia policies and kept a low profile since leaving office.
In the published extracts of her memoir, she discusses her many encounters with Putin, describing how he struck her as a man desperate to be taken seriously.
“I experienced him as someone who didn’t want to be disrespected, ready to lash out at all times,” she wrote. “You might find that childish and contemptible, you might shake your head at that. But it meant Russia never vanished from the map.”
At one point she appears to suggest that Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine was timed to follow her departure from office. “You won’t always be Chancellor, and then they’ll join NATO,” he said of Ukraine. “And I want to prevent that.”
Some Central and Eastern European leaders, she added, had been guilty of wishful thinking: “They seem to want the country to just disappear, to not exist. I couldn’t blame them… But Russia, heavily nuclear armed, did exist.”