Angela Merkel has said she was “tormented” over the result of the Brexit referendum and viewed it as a “humiliation, a disgrace” for the EU that Britain was leaving.
In her autobiography, Freedom, due to be published on Tuesday, the former German chancellor says she was dismayed by the notion that she might have done more to help the then British prime minister, David Cameron, who was keen for the UK to stay in the EU, but that ultimately, she concluded, he only had himself to blame.
In extracts from the book, Merkel, who left office three years ago, said looking back she recognised that Brexit was on the cards once Cameron proposed in 2005 that Conservative party MEPs should leave the European People’s party, which they subsequently did, over the parliamentary alliance’s backing of the Lisbon treaty in 2009.
The treaty introduced significant changes to the EU that anti-European critics considered undemocratic.
In her 700-page memoir, about five pages are dedicated to Brexit and to her role in the pre-referendum negotiations with Cameron in an attempt to help him keep Britain inside the bloc. She also writes about the subsequent exit deal drawn out over several years once Britain had decided to leave, and refers to how deflated she felt over the result.
“To me, the result felt like a humiliation, a disgrace for us, the other members of the European Union – the United Kingdom was leaving us in the lurch. This changed the European Union in the view of the world; we were weakened.”
Merkel writes about how she had reached out to Cameron as he struggled to try to secure changes over freedom of movement and trade that might have won over Eurosceptics and allowed him to keep the UK in a reformed EU.
She says she “tried wherever possible to help David Cameron”, despite risking the ire of other EU leaders who had distanced themselves from him.
Referring to various stages in her attempts to help him and ensure he was not isolated, most crucially at a summit of EU leaders in February 2016 during which an agreement was expected to be reached over Britain’s renegotiation demands to stay in the EU, she says: “My support of him rendered me an outsider with my other colleagues … The impact of the euro crisis was still lingering, and I was also being repeatedly accused of stinginess.
“And yet, during the summit, I steadfastly remained by David Cameron’s side for an entire evening. In this way I was able to prevent his complete isolation in the council and eventually move the others to back down. I did this because I knew from various discussions with Cameron that where domestic policy was concerned, he had no room for manoeuvre whatsoever.”
But she writes that there came a point when she could no longer help him.
The UK she says, had not helped itself by making the mistake of not introducing restrictions on eastern European workers once 10 new countries joined the bloc in May 2004, the then Labour government having grossly underestimated the number of people who would arrive. This gave Eurosceptics the chance to put freedom of movement in a negative light.
By contrast, France and Germany introduced a gradual phase-in of eastern Europeans’ rights to work, not giving them full access to their labour markets until 2011.
Merkel says she thought Cameron’s pledge in 2005 for the Conservatives to leave the EPP was the initial nail in the coffin of any attempts to keep Britain in the EU. “He therefore, from the very beginning, put himself in the hands of those who were sceptical about the European Union, and was never able to escape this dependency,” she writes.
Brexit, she concludes, “demonstrated in textbook fashion the consequences that can arise when there’s a miscalculation from the very start”.
Subsequently she was pained by the idea that she might have been able to have done more to keep the UK in the fold, she says.
“After the referendum, I was tormented by whether I should have made even more concessions toward the UK to make it possible for them to remain in the community. I came to the conclusion that, in the face of the political developments taking place at the time within the country, there wouldn’t have been any reasonable way of my preventing the UK’s path out of the European Union as an outsider. Even with the best political will, mistakes of the past could not be undone.”