Berlin: Angela Merkel sought advice from the Pope on dealing with Donald Trump when he was first elected US president, hoping to find ways of convincing a man she saw as having a property developer’s winner-or-loser mentality not to quit the Paris climate accords.
In her memoir, extracts of which were published in German weekly Die Zeit on Wednesday (Thursday AEDT), the long-serving German chancellor detailed her difficulties in dealing with Trump, who, she said, appeared to be fascinated by Russian President Vladimir Putin and other authoritarian leaders.
German chancellor Angela Merkel deliberates with then-US president Donald Trump in 2018.Credit: Getty Images
“He saw everything from the perspective of the property developer he was before entering politics,” she wrote. “Each parcel of land could only be sold once, and if he didn’t get it, someone else did. That’s how he saw the world.”
Pope Francis, when Merkel asked him in general terms for advice on dealing with people “with fundamentally different views”, immediately understood she was referring to Trump and his desire to quit the climate accords, she wrote.
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“Bend, bend, bend, but make sure it doesn’t break,” he told Merkel, according to her account.
When Trump took office in 2017, Merkel was one of the world’s longest-serving elected leaders and the most influential in the European Union by far after having shaped Germany and the Continent’s response to the euro zone debt crisis and Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine.
As much of the world fretted over Trump’s presidency, Merkel’s unruffled demeanour and her frequent invocations of values such as freedom and human rights led to some dubbing her the true “leader of the free world” – a moniker traditionally reserved for US presidents.
Written before Trump’s re-election, the book expresses the “heartfelt hope” that Vice President Kamala Harris would defeat her rival.
