Angela Merkel admits she was relieved when Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier officially handed her her "dismissal" letter last Tuesday and is grateful for the chance to remain in the chancellorship for 16 years. "It's good now that someone else comes," she says of her successor, but she defends her decisions on refugees and the pandemic and warns against the risk of "forgetting history".
In an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, the – now serving – chancellor asks "not to forget the important lessons from history" and recalls that the multilateral world order was created because of the lessons of the Second World War.
"One danger," he points out, "is that Europeans take the European Union for granted." It is a recurring pattern in history that people begin to take structures lightly when the generations that created them are no longer alive, Mrs Merkel explains.
In the same interview, the chancellor also warns against any frivolity in dealing with the pandemic and expresses her concern about the continued increase in cases in Germany. The evolution of the numbers of the dead and those hospitalized causes me "great concern", he says and calls on citizens to get vaccinated. "For example, the fact that two or three million citizens over the age of 60 are still unvaccinated makes me very sad, because that could make a difference - both for them personally, and for society as a whole," he says.
According to APE-MPE, when asked about the case of Joshua Kimmich, a soccer player of Bayern Munich, who refuses to be vaccinated citing the lack of data on the long-term consequences of vaccines, Angela Merkel notes in principle that in Germany vaccination is not mandatory, but adds that there are very well-founded arguments and hopes Mr Kimmich will reconsider. "He is known as a football player who studies things," adds the outgoing Chancellor.
At the same time, he defends the sometimes drastic restrictions on individual freedoms during the pandemic. He considered, as he says, the duty of the state to protect the health of as many people as possible and prevent hospitals from being overloaded. "Of course, one can argue about this or that measure," he says, admitting that the most controversial measure was the curfew, and that the pandemic was particularly difficult for children and young people. "I knew it every moment, we were demanding too much from them," he says characteristically.
Angela Merkel still refers to the refugee crisis and the decisions she made in 2015, explaining that from the first moment she had thought about the solution of EU-Turkey cooperation, "but it took some time". She acknowledges that she, as chancellor, was always politically responsible for everything that happened – positive or negative. "Both for the good times, where we warmly welcomed the refugees, and for the dark hours, for example on New Year's Eve in Cologne Square, where monstrous things happened, involving refugees, but also others, who were here more time," says Mrs. Merkel, referring to incidents of rape and sexual harassment by refugees on New Year's Eve 2016 in Cologne.
Germany "cannot regulate immigration alone, at least not sustainably, only as part of the EU and in this particular case only together with Turkey", adds the chancellor and points out that the Brussels-Ankara agreement "was successful and is up to and today beneficial for both sides". He even calls it, along with the bailout of savers in the 2008 financial crisis, "a decision with a high impact" during those 16 years. "This attention to crises and the constant effort to prevent or at least react in time make the work of the chancellery so demanding," he concludes.
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