Angela Merkel has released a 700-page snoozeroo of self-serving malarkey, titled Freedom: Memoirs 1954–2021. No doubt it’s only the second-biggest selling memoir by a German chancellor.
Oddly enough, both of them were penned by German leaders apparently intent on wrecking Europe. One of them, at least mercifully suicided in a Berlin bunker. The other, for some mysterious reason probably known only to Tony Blair and George Bush, somehow isn’t in a prison cell.
It is an abiding mystery how a leader who got energy, the economy, defence, foreign affairs and migration so catastrophically wrong still enjoys any support at all.
Early in her tenure the German press dubbed Merkel the Climate Chancellor for championing the country’s Energiewende (energy transition). Since 2000 the nation has spent $1 trillion shutting fossil fuel and nuclear generation and replacing it with wind and solar energy harvesting.
And how did that one work out? So badly, of course, that our own moronic “Climate Change and Energy Minister” is hell-bent on repeating its every mistake. Every bit as disastrously for Australia as it was for Germany.
It is an unmitigated disaster. German electricity costs have soared to be the highest in Europe and German carbon emissions per person are about twice that of nuclear-powered France.
A quarter of a century into Germany’s transition, 78 per cent of its primary energy still comes from coal (18 per cent), oil (34 per cent) and gas (26 per cent).
Even worse, it was a cataclysmic strategic blunder. Merkel could smirk all she wanted when Donald Trump warned that she was making Germany and the rest of northern Europe critically dependent on Russian gas, but he was all-too right. The smirk was wiped off Germany’s face when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine once Trump was safely out of office.
Merkel ignored this and other warnings. No one was more strident in his opposition than once and future president Donald Trump. In 2018 he told the NATO summit in Brussels that Germany had become a captive to Moscow “because it’s getting so much of its energy from Russia” […]
Behind a green facade, Germany hid a lifeline to Russian fossil fuel. In 2022 Berlin relied on Moscow for a third of its oil and more than half of its gas imports. This was a glaring, and colossal, strategic weakness.
Trump was not the only voice of reason: in 2014, when Russia invaded the Crimea, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk warned Merkel that Germany and Europe were strategically exposed by its energy dependence. Merkel didn’t pay the least attention.
Merkel’s strategic blindness was, in hindsight, as astonishing as Chamberlain’s in 1938. Just four months before the outbreak of war, Merkel signed off on a top secret security assessment that concluded, bizarrely, that certifying the Nord Stream 2 pipeline “does not jeopardise the security of gas supply in Germany and the European Union”. These cretins disastrously gambled on Putin’s good behaviour.
When Russia invaded Ukraine the gas pipeline was cut and the green fraud collapsed.
Germany reopened brown-coal-fired generators, scoured the globe for fuel and moved at warp speed to get liquefied natural gas import terminals to save its grid from collapse […]
Patrick Wintour wrote in the Guardian that in the first two months of the Ukraine war Germany paid “€8.3bn for Russian energy – money used by Moscow to prop up the rouble and buy the artillery shells firing at Ukrainian positions in Donetsk”. Historian Timothy Snyder took to Twitter to note: “For 30 years, Germans lectured Ukrainians about fascism. When fascism actually arrived, Germans funded it, and Ukrainians died fighting it.”
This is just the biggest in the laundry list of Merkel’s strategic pratfalls. Like decades of post-War German governments, she was content to hide behind America’s apron strings and completely disregard Germany’s NATO requirement to spend two per cent of GDP on defence. Merkel cut defence spending to almost half of that.
In fact, Merkel has turned out to be the biggest friend dictators have had in Europe since Lord Haw-Haw. She not only gave an open field and billions of Euros to Putin, she helped power up China’s economy by driving German manufacturing out of the country and its staggeringly high energy costs.
China is now eating Germany’s lunch. Analysis by the Institute for Economic Research finds “Germany’s lead over China in the European Union market is increasingly shrinking”.
The root cause of the nation’s woes is identified as “the challenges associated with the energy transition and fundamental problems regarding competitiveness” […]
Soon, Germany’s giant car industry will collapse. Its biggest private sector employer, Volkswagen, is threatening to close domestic plants for the first time in its 87-year history.
Then there’s her unilateral decision to flood Europe with millions of fighting-age Muslim men.
All in all, Merkel should be damned as the third German leader in less than a century to drive Europe to the brink of ruin.
