With the euro zone heading toward some tough economic times (it’s hardly alone in this, but the currency union’s structural failings have a way of making the bad worse), this report on Germany, the euro zone’s largest economy, might signal grim times ahead.

The Daily Telegraph:

German businesses are set to pay the price for years of reliance on Russian gas, with a new study saying the corporates in the country face soaring bills as Moscow throttles energy supplies.
Companies in Germany are at the greatest risk of default compared with their European counterparts, according to the Weil European Distress Index, which looked at data from more than 3,750 listed companies across Europe….

But what does Angela Merkel, the former chancellor of Germany who presided over the reacceleration of the country’s scrapping of its nuclear power stations and its increasing reliance on renewables and Russian gas, have to say about her handling of relations with Moscow?

Writing in the Financial Times, Constanze Stelzenmüller:

After handing over to her successor Olaf Scholz in December, [Merkel] disappeared from public view, taking winter walks along the Baltic Sea and listening to an audiobook of Macbeth. Six months later — and four months into the war — she is back and clearly intent on protecting her legacy in a series of conversations, speeches and interviews.
Merkel left office of her own will, the only postwar chancellor to do so. She was popular at home and she was admired worldwide as one of Germany’s greatest postwar leaders. Now, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24 has cast a dark backwards shadow over her tenure.

Indeed she was admired, greatly so, something that at one level was remarkable (to me, it has long been evident that she was one of Germany’s worst post-war chancellors), but at another not. Whatever her shortcomings, she had immense political skills, and those included knowing how to play to an audience, whether in Germany or beyond it.

Stelzenmüller:

Should [Merkel] not have paid more attention to Putin’s repression of civil society and murders of political opponents in Russia? His poisoning of European politics by means of disinformation and corruption? His careful weaving of a continent-wide web of dependency on Russian gas? His stationing of intermediate-range missiles in Kaliningrad? His increasingly evident imperial ambitions?
Should she not have seen a connection between the assault on Chechnya, with which Putin began his reign at the turn of the millennium, the war with Georgia in 2008 which resulted in that country’s dismemberment at Russian hands, the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and eight years of proxy war in Donbas with 14,000 dead? But those who expected a self-critical examination of her record were disappointed.
“I don’t see that I should now have to say, that was wrong. And I will therefore not apologise.” The literal English translation is clunky, but then so is Merkelish in the original German. The point of the former chancellor’s remarks to a Berlin theatre audience was clear enough: she had nothing to regret.
Merkel contended that she always saw through Putin: “I always knew he wanted to destroy Europe.” Yet she insisted — in a phrase redolent of Bismarckian Realpolitik — that it was important to maintain “a trade connection” with “the world’s second largest nuclear power”.
One commentator branded her comments as appeasement. A second seized on her description of Putin’s war as “a great tragedy” as evidence of fatalistic determinism. Others suggested that Merkel had simply been “the perfect chancellor for a system that had reached its limits”. None of these explanations is entirely off the mark.
What matters, however, is that Merkel’s signature approach to dealing with problems — comprehending them fully, but choosing to manage rather than to resolve them — was shared not just by her various coalition partners, but by the German business community and by voters. It is in line with a longstanding postwar tradition of German leaders framing strategic choices as strategic constraints, thereby evading the appearance of agency or responsibility.
As a recipe for grappling with an unchained totalitarian Russia — and with a future of permanent upheaval and disruption — it is not just futile but reckless.

Too true.

One additional detail from Stelzenmüller’s piece that stands out was a reference to (an apologetic) Sigmar Gabriel. A member of the SPD, Merkel’s center-left coalition partners, Gabriel rose to be foreign minister, but was economic affairs and energy minister at the time that Russia annexed Crimea. Stelzenmüller notes that Gabriel sold Germany’s largest gas-storage facilities to Gazprom after the Kremlin’s seizure of the peninsula.

Now turn back to the Daily Telegraph:

In February, Mr Habeck [Germany’s economic minister] said Gazprom, which operates midstream energy infrastructure in Germany, had “systematically emptied” the country’s gas storage facilities in the run up to the war.

And here we are.