Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel described the impression created by the elected American president, Donald Trump, during their first meeting at the White House.

In an interview with CNN, Angela Merkel recalled her impression of Trump, saying the new US president showed a “charm with brute force” of strongmen like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

“The way he talked about Putin, the way he talked about the North Korean (leader) — obviously aside from the critical remarks he made — there was always a kind of fascination with the raw power of what these people could do,” said Merkel.

Merkel discussed her memoir Freedom, released last week, in which she reveals her life is split in half. She spent the first 35 years of her life studying and then working as a chemist in communist East Germany. But after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the second 35 years of her life were spent in a free, liberal democracy – a system she now fears is under threat.

“These days, liberal democracies are under attack. They are under pressure,” Merkel told CNN.

For her first meeting in the White House in 2017 with Donald Trump, Merkel recalls sitting next to the famous fireplace in the Oval Office. The two leaders were asked by journalists to shake hands for a photo. Trump appeared to snub that request, though they shook hands at other times during Merkel’s visit.

Merkel said Trump “lives by acting unconventionally.” As she writes in her book, she was “clearly fascinated” by Putin and “captured” by politicians with authoritarian tendencies.

“My impression was always that he really dreamed of bypassing maybe all those parliamentary bodies that he felt were somehow a burden on him and that he wanted to decide things himself,” Merkel told CNN. “In a democracy – you can’t reconcile that with democratic

A renewed Russia

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Angela Merkel have had a close relationship, much closer than many other European leaders.

Merkel recalled how Putin, knowing that she herself had once been injured by a dog and how worried she was about it, brought a large Labrador to a meeting in 2007.

“It’s a small, small effort to test the waters – you know, how resilient a person is, how strong,” Merkel said. “It’s a power play.”

Despite relatively cordial relations between Moscow and Europe, Merkel said things began to deteriorate after the 2008 North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit in Bucharest. NATO has been saying that both Ukraine and Georgia will eventually join the defense alliance, without giving them a plan for how to get there.

“I was firmly convinced that Putin would not allow this to happen without taking action, so I thought it was wrong to put it on the agenda at the time,” Merkel said, particularly when the government and people of Ukraine ” they were divided.”

As the war in Ukraine approaches its fourth year, with both sides suffering massive casualties, the debate is turning to whether the war can end in a lasting peace. Trump, who takes office next month, has said he will end the war within a day, but has not specified how.

Merkel warned that negotiating with Putin is a difficult task. She recalled confronting Putin over Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014 – an operation the Kremlin initially tried to gloss over, arguing that soldiers fighting in Ukraine were not part of Moscow’s military, creating the myth of the “little greens”. » who were fighting independently.

Merkel said Putin later admitted to her that he had “lied” about it.

“There was a turning point in our relationship because of that and we had to be extremely careful in my approach to him. So you can’t just trust a deal with him – that’s absolutely right,” he said. Negotiations to end the war in Ukraine must provide Kiev with “security guarantees”, he added.

Asked if she had made mistakes during her time as prime minister, Merkel said: “We always have to look at things in the circumstances we were in at the time. I don’t think it makes much sense to say that in hindsight from today’s perspective.”