Opinion | Angela Merkel Isnt Ready to Say Sorry

On page 273 of her memoir, Angela Merkel admits she made a mistake.Ms.Merkel, the former German chancellor who left office in 2021 after 16 years in power, recalls a blunder from the early days of her political career, when she was the opposition leader to Chancellor Gerhard Schröder.

In a 2003 guest essay for The Washington Post, she attacked him for criticizing the impending American invasion of Iraq: “Schröder doesn’t speak for all Germans,” the headline ran.Strangely, the mistake Ms.Merkel acknowledges is not her support for the Iraq war, even though she now thinks the invasion was wrong.

The error was one not of judgment but of manners.“It wasn’t right,” she writes in her book, “to attack my own chief of government head-on in the international sphere.” Domestic differences should not be dealt with “on foreign soil.”This reserved approach is typical of Ms.

Merkel’s 700-page “Freedom: Memoirs 1954-2021,” which is released worldwide on Tuesday.Readers will find quite a few passages in which she concedes minor mistakes or regrets trivial side effects of big decisions, which themselves go unexamined.

On what now look like her major failings — such as overwhelming the welfare system with her refugee policy or not stemming the rise of the far right — there is either evasion or equivocation.After three years away, Ms.Merkel is stepping back onto the world stage.

But she isn’t ready to say “sorry.”Ms.Merkel, once heralded as the most powerful woman in the world, was one of Germany’s most popular politicians.

But her reputation has suffered in recent years.Germans increasingly view her four terms as an era of missed opportunities and grave mistakes, as they face crumbling infrastructure with woefully slow trains and internet connections, an economy dangerously dependent on China, an underfunded army and a society divided by high levels of immigration and the rise of right-wing populism.

The war in Ukraine has cast Ms.Merkel...