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Angela Merkel tried to calm the nerves of the European leaders for a second Donald Trump presidency, claiming that he is not as ill-disposed towards them as many believe.
Ex German chancellor from 2005 to 2021 who worked with President-elect Trump during his first term gave her assessment of what his second term will mean Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart on their podcast The rest is politics.
With Trump making her first international appearance at the reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris on Saturday night, Mrs Merkel claimed that he actually sees Europe as positive in making America great again.
She told the podcast: “I can only speak from my experience in those four years [when I was in office at the same time as him] is that I think he knows that cooperation, especially with the European Union and within NATO, is not only good for us, but also for the United States.
“Anything else would not be good for the US. After all, he wants the United States to be important, to be great. The transatlantic partnership also makes America bigger. Sometimes people say that we are the only users, but that is not true.
“If you look at the map of the world and the very dimension of the challenge, there are very good reasons that the United States of America needs Europe and the European part of the transatlantic partnership.”
The former German chancellor also spoke at length about Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom she accused of not understanding the “freedom boom”.
Merkel said Russians “do not have a good life under his leadership” and wished them a “democratic and prosperous future”.
She recalled: “I have often thought about how we can bring democracy to Russia.”
“For example, the privatization carried out by the United States, where certain shares were given to everyone, allowing people to share in the wealth. However, most people at the time used it for quick cash and then spent the money or gave away the stock. This led to a huge concentration of ownership rights, which actually prevented the development of a proper middle class, perhaps with smaller businesses, for example, from thriving.”
Looking at the war in Ukraine and the wider problems of Putin’s aggressive foreign policy, she said it was because he was angry about the collapse of the Soviet Union and Russia’s diminished power after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Mrs. Merkel noted: “Putin is someone who the Russians, as a president, saw to lead them out of the chaos, out of this superiority over the oligarchs, the fact that the economy is collapsing with the transition to a market economy.”
“They wanted people to get their salaries, to work against inflation, where not all 50 to 60 percent of inflation is eaten up. And Putin, and I think this is something that was actually quite clear to him from the beginning, this incredible sentence that he said, the worst event for him in the 20th century was the collapse of the Soviet Union. And I said, quite frankly, ‘I thought Nazism and National Socialism were the worst events of the 20th century’?.
She continued: “He wanted to make Russia an important power again. That was who he was all along. And I don’t think he knew that much about economics, about economic prosperity. So he very quickly resorted to rebuilding this power using methods he learned as a KGB agent. He was actually able to tame, if you will, the oligarchs, to tame them. They are allowed to work, but only under him.”