Former Chancellor Anglea Merkel was awarded Germany’s highest honour of merit on Monday despite a questionable legacy including ushering in the European Migrant Crisis and leaving her country in a state of dependence on Russia after her failed green energy push.
In Germany, every Federal Chancellor is awarded a Federal Cross of Merit after leaving office, however, it is up to the Federal President to determine which of the eight levels of merit the chancellor receives. On Monday, it was announced that Chancellor Angela Merkel would receive the highest order of merit, the “Grand Cross” for her 16 years in office.
The honour has only been bestowed on two other chancellors, Konrad Adenauer, who oversaw the Western integration of Germany following the Second World War, and Helmut Kohl, who led the country through unification following the fall of the Berlin Wall. The prestigious award has also been granted to foreign heads of state, including Russia’s Mikhail Gorbachev, French wartime leader Charles de Gaulle, and the leader of the Velvet Revolution and the last president of Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel.
German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier (L) awards the Order of Merit to former German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the Bellevue presidential palace in Berlin on April 17, 2023. (Photo by John MACDOUGALL / AFP) (Photo by JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP via Getty Images)
The decision to bestow the honour upon Merkel from now-President Frank-Walter Steinmeier — her longtime foreign minister who led the nation’s disastrous policy on Russia — has sparked controversy, with many pointing to her record of failure, particularly on energy and immigration.
Even a leading member of her former political party, CDU Vice President Carsten Linnemann said that while Merkel had some “great merits”, he acknowledged that “mistakes were also made, even blatant ones.”
“In the case of migration, blatant mistakes were made that we did not protect the borders. This should be addressed just as openly as the positives.” Linnemann said, adding that Merkel’s decision to phase out nuclear power “was a mistake in the form at the time, without saying how we want to supply ourselves with energy reasonably self-sufficiently.”
Andreas Rödder, the head of the CDU Fundamental Values Commission, added that he believed that handing Merkel the award is “a mistake with which the Federal President harms democracy and its credibility.”
Angela Merkel’s legacy has severely waned following her exit from office a year and a half ago, principally on her failures to heed warnings — from former President Donald Trump, among others — on the threat posed by relying on Vladimir Putin’s Russia for energy, which following the invasion of Ukraine sparked economic and energy crises in the European Union’s main manufacturing hub.
In October of last year, it was revealed in a declassified document that was drafted four months before the February invasion of Ukraine that Merkel’s government foolishly believed that increasing dependency on Russian gas with the now sidelined Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline would “not jeopardise” Germany’s energy security.
The decision to ignore warnings from former President Donald Trump, who told Merkel in 2018 that Nord Stream 2 would leave Germany “captive” to the political whims of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, turned out to be disastrous for Germany in the months after her resignation, with tens of tens of billions of euros being wiped from the German economy and people and businesses forced to ration their energy usage.
BERLIN, GERMANY – APRIL 17: European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen attends a ceremony at which former German Chancellor Angela Merkel received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
Fellow globalist and onetime ally, former President of the European Council Donald Tusk declared last year that Merkel’s reliance on Russian gas — which she argued was necessary to keep her green agenda afloat — would go down as one of the “biggest mistakes” of her time in office.
Tusk added: “As Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel was helpless in the face of the lobbying force of domestic entrepreneurs,” going on to claim that Merkel “admitted” this was the case in private conversations with him.
Her focus on investing in the green agenda as well as propping up social welfare programmes also saw Germany’s military consistently neglected during Merkel’s reign, with the wealthy nation consistently failing to meet the 2 per cent of GDP defence spending requirement for the NATO alliance.
The derelict state of the Bundeswehr left the country scrambling when called upon to supply weapons and ammunition to Ukraine once it decided to do so, with Germany’s reliance on Russia to keep the lights on widely discussed as a cause for the nation’s reluctance to give material support to Ukraine in the early months of the war. Berlin has taken a backseat to Paris and London during the conflict since.
Nevertheless, Merkel has refused to acknowledge any guilt for her role in the Ukraine crisis, saying last year: “I don’t blame myself for not having tried hard enough… I tried sufficiently. It is a great sadness that I did not succeed.”
Merkel has similarly been unrepentant in terms of the other major policy that came to define her tenure in office, the European Migrant Crisis of 2015 when she unilaterally opened the doors of Europe open to mass migration.
The open borders policy, which allowed over a million migrants from Syria and elsewhere to flood the country, was promised to usher in a globalist vision of prosperity, however, in reality, the vast majority of migrants who entered the country have been an economic drain, with some 65 per cent being recorded as unemployed by 2019.
Studies from the government itself have also admitted the mass influx of foreigners from far-off places to a rise in violent crime and terror attacks. In a defining moment for the crisis, a fraudulent asylum seeker, Anis Amri murdered a dozen people and injured over 50 more after he drove a heavy goods truck into a crowded Christmas market in December of 2016.
In addition to the economic and social degradation witnessed in Germany, Merkel’s decision has also had serious implications for the demographic makeup of the country, with one-third of the population predicted to have a foreign background (either being from a foreign country themselves or having at least one migrant parent) by the year 2040. The impact is expected to be more pronounced in major cities such as Frankfurt — which became the nation’s first minority-majority city in 2017 — and is predicted to see as much as 70 per cent of its population have a migration background.
Yet, despite all of this, then Chancellor Merkel said in 2020 that she would “make essentially the same decisions” during the European Migrant Crisis again.