Merkel's falling star

The Story

Angela Merkel has allowed another newspaper to do a long interview with her. But she still refuses to accept that she did anything wrong in allowing Gazprom to put Germany in an arm lock.

Last week she confided to Der Spiegel that she was a spent force by last summer, when Putin barely took her seriously any more. This week she admitted to mistakes made in the aftermath of Russia’s annexation of the Crimea in 2014.

Merkel told Die Zeit that “we should have reacted more quickly to Russia's aggressiveness,” saying she took personal responsibility for not "making impassioned speeches every day” about modernising the army.

At the same time, she appeared to put the blame on the Social Democrats, who were her junior coalition partners, saying that her CDU were the only party to commit to spending two percent of GDP on the military in their manifesto.

More interesting than this semi-confession was her blunt refusal to show self-criticism on her energy policies.

Arguing that alternative s…