Last night, nearly three years to the day since she handed over the reins of power to Olaf Scholz, Angela Merkel appeared at London’s Royal Festival Hall to promote her newly published memoir, Freiheit, or ‘Freedom’.
The compulsion to write her memoirs first arose in 2015, she said, out of a desire to explain her decision to open Germany’s doors to over one million asylum seekers
Merkel’s autobiography comes at an important moment for the country she used to govern. After the collapse of Scholz’s traffic light government, Germany is staring down the barrel of a snap election expected to take place in February. With the country grappling with all-time high levels of migration, growing crime rates, a stuttering economy, increasingly polarised support for Ukraine and a soaring cost of living crisis, many of the policies Merkel introduced and championed have come under scrutiny. The former chancellor’s legacy is facing a reckoning: how much of the blame for Germany’s current litany of problems can be laid at her door?
Merkel herself is resolutely unapologetic: she has no regrets.
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