Pietro De Leo March 26, 2022
The silence of Angela Merkel, the position of Angela Merkel, the (non)role of Angela Merkel. It is a subject that will be addressed in an article in the Corriere della Sera today, Saturday 26 March. Here in Italy the issue is very nuanced, with the demise of that leader who for us embodied Nordic austerity opposed to Mediterranean flexibility during the dramatic years of the sovereign debt crisis. But in Germany, the profile of the mother, that is, the metaphorical mother of a German and European political era, still stands out in the public debate a few months after she left the chancellorship. In fact, the question is how much the structure of its relations with Russia has affected the current situation. In addition, he notes that Germany is the country ahead of Italy that imports the most gas from Russia (43 billion cubic meters).
According to Tina Hildebrandt in Die Zeit (Corriere reports), the war “made Merkel a prisoner in a political no man’s land, lost in translation, so to speak”. According to the columnist, Merkel also conceived of Vladimir Putin as “a rascal he could trust and need to talk to.” And according to the Corriere article, “The biggest mistake was approving Nord Stream 2 in 2014, the same year that Putin annexed Crimea against the advice of his National Security Adviser, Cristoph Heusgen, who had warned him about geopolitics Pipeline Risks.
Beyond the final tally of this season, however, is the fact that there is one missing at this moment Grand European Ombudsman in the RussianUkrainian Crisis, a role which inevitably cannot be embodied by the incumbent Heads of State or Government, as they are all rightly aligned with the NATO line. And then, in the past few weeks, the name of Angela Merkel had been blown up precisely because of her relationship with Putin.
And there is another personality who could have performed this role with a clear mandate: Silvio Berlusconi. Not only and not so much because of the former friendship with the Kremlin chief, from which the former prime minister clearly and resolutely distanced himself after the invasion.
As for the historical passage of the Pratica di Mare summit, exactly 20 years ago. Russia has never been so close to the West, as witnessed by the photo of Berlusconi bringing Putin’s hand to that of thenUS President George W. Bush. That moment marked the reaffirmation of the primacy of politics, which then gradually weakened in the belief that the energy link, alongside a postCrimean annexation sanctions policy, was sufficient to contain Putin. A change of course that later turned out to be wrong.