Putin, Trump, Brexit Key takeaways from highly anticipated Merkel memoir

Angela Merkel was notoriously discreet and privacy-conscious as Germany's chancellor, rarely veering off message during her 16 years in office. In her eagerly anticipated political autobiography, Freedom: Memoirs 1954-2021, she has hardly turned into a gossipmonger overnight. But across 721 pages - published yesterday - there are glimpses of a Merkel previously unseen. Here are eight things we have learned.

- Philip Oltermann

Freedom is not a book of any major mea culpas. Merkel's decision to accept more than 1 million refugees, mostly Syrian, into Germany in 2015 was not a mistake, she says: "The opposite is true."

Her 2011 policy U-turn on nuclear energy, leading to the phase-out of the country's remaining reactors, came about because the accident in Fukushima, Japan, "changed my perception of risk posed by nuclear energy". She says she would not recommend the use of nuclear in the future either.

The book presents a number of reasons why she and the then French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, were right to block Ukraine and Georgia from joining Nato's membership action plan in 2008 - a decision heavily criticised by Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. With her veto, she says, she was considering not just Ukraine's security but also the need to "increase the efficacy of Nato as a whole".

Britain's vote to leave the EU in 2016 genuinely shook Merkel: she experienced it as "a humiliation, a disgrace for us", which left the bloc weakened. "I was tormented by whether I should have made even more concessions toward the UK," she writes.

It's not a full admission of an error because she concludes that Brexit was a self-inflicted wound that Britain's neighbours could have done little to prevent.

Merkel also corrects her stance on her domestic fiscal policy, even if this too is not exactly phrased as a regret. The "debt brake" mechanism, which limits Germany's budget deficit to 0.35% of GDP, was enshrined in the constitution during Merkel's first term. It was a totemic policy, but it led to a chronic underinvestment in infrastructure.