From Russia dependency to populist rise: why Merkel’s moralism came at a high cost.
Benjamin Reed
Oct 23, 2025 - 10:24 PM
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As a child growing up in America, I romanticized Europe: cobblestoned streets in Montmartre; Parisians carrying baguettes beneath wrought-iron balconies; the sound of Édith Piaf floating through the air. That Europe of cafés, cathedrals, and quiet confidence still exists in fragments, yet it is fading. The continent that once served as the world’s moral compass has become the sick man of the democratic world.
I saw it with my own eyes. In 2022, in the trenches of eastern Ukraine, I felt the cost of Merkel’s policies. Drones buzzing overhead, freezing cold leaking through sandbags, villages turned to ash. This wasn’t abstract. It was sixteen years of German decisions that mistook caution for wisdom and trade for security. Pipelines, half-measures, moral posturing - they all added up to a war that should have been stopped long before it reached Europe. Merkel’s time in office left the continent dependent on Russian gas, soft, and unprepared. And now, we are paying the price.
The Cost of Idealism
Where should one begin tallying the Christian Democratic Union’s missteps under Merkel? Perhaps with her interview to the Hungarian outlet Partizán, where she implied that Poland and the Baltic states shared blame for Europe’s failed dialogue with Moscow. She recalled a 2021 proposal, made with Emmanuel Macron, for an EU–Russia summit. When Warsaw, Tallinn, Riga, and Vilnius rejected the idea, Merkel said their refusal left Putin isolated and more dangerous. The irony was plain: she voiced this in Hungary, where Viktor Orbán continues to court the Kremlin.
Her story omits her own role. In 2014, as Russian troops without insignia seized Crimea and armed the separatists in Donbas, Berlin condemned the aggression but avoided confrontation. Merkel promoted the Minsk accords as a peace formula while Russia used the lull to rearm. The downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, which killed 298 civilians with a missile traced to Russian forces, did not change her faith in dialogue. Instead, Germany deepened energy ties. Nord Stream 2 became the symbol of her multibillion-euro wager that trade would civilize tyranny. By 2021, Russia supplied more than half of Germany’s gas. The policy of Wandel durch Handel, change through trade, failed. It financed the Kremlin’s militarism rather than moderating it.
Merkel’s 2011 nuclear decision locked Europe to Russian gas and sabotaged the green transition that followed. The 2019 European Green Deal, Ursula von der Leyen’s blueprint for net-zero emissions by 2050, relied on Germany’s grid. Yet the phase-out of nuclear power erased twenty-two gigawatts of clean baseload energy, leaving renewables too fragile to stand on their own. Russian gas filled the gap. It was cheap until Putin turned off the taps in 2022, sending electricity prices up four-hundred percent and forcing a return to coal.
Migration and Green Fragility
Reckoning arrived in 2023, when the EU mandated that all new cars sold after 2035 must be electric. The policy required enough generation to power thirty million vehicles and millions of charging stations. The grid was never ready. Dependent on gas for peak demand, Europe entered each winter on the edge of shortage. Nuclear power could have anchored this transition, pairing steady output with renewable growth. Instead, Merkel’s post-Fukushima moralism built fragility. Europe’s green future was tied to the same Russian pipelines that funded its adversary.
Her errors extended beyond energy. In 2015, as the Syrian war displaced millions, Merkel suspended the EU’s Dublin rules and opened Germany’s borders to more than a million asylum seekers. At a press conference on August 31 she declared Wir schaffen das, we can do this, a moral pledge rooted in the belief that compassion could substitute for strategy. Drawing on Germany’s postwar guilt and labor shortages, she presented openness as redemption. Scholars from the London School of Economics and Brookings later described the decision as humanitarianism outpacing realism.
Open doors soon exposed their limits. Housing shortages deepened; integration programs buckled; incidents such as the 2015–2016 New Year’s assaults in Cologne inflamed public unease. What Merkel saw as ethical leadership became a catalyst for division. Her wager on goodwill, like her faith in Russian gas, ignored how quickly virtue can erode under pressure. The backlash lifted the Alternative for Germany to 12.6 percent in the 2017 Bundestag elections, fueled by immigration fears and a growing admiration for Putin’s defiance of liberal Europe.
Merkel’s moral policies - environmental virtue, migrant openness, and belief in dialogue - hardened into a broader European malaise. Energy virtue bred dependency; border idealism enabled perilous crossings that claimed thousands of lives in the Mediterranean. The arrivals, mostly young men from fractured societies, entered nations already strained by inflation, housing shortages, and political fatigue. Integration, once imagined as a civic mission, has become a source of friction so deep that Europe risks losing its sense of purpose altogether.
Populism, Russia, and the West
It is no mystery why populists now rise promising order amid chaos. Yet behind parties such as the AfD, Moscow’s influence is visible. Their leaders have traveled to Russia and consistently voted against German military aid to Ukraine, including 2023 Bundestag motions on long-range systems such as HIMARS. Senior figures like Alexander Gauland and Tino Chrupalla have echoed the Kremlin’s rhetoric on sanctions and sovereignty, portraying Putin as a defender of tradition against Western decline. The project is clear: dissolve the EU, fracture NATO, and leave Europe a patchwork of anxious states, easy to coerce one by one. To destroy the union is to erase Europe’s leverage, the collective strength that gives it a voice in global affairs.
As an American, I speak in solidarity, not judgment. The transatlantic bond remains the spine of the free world, but it must be renewed through realism, not nostalgia. The leaders of the 2000s mistook sentiment for strategy, believing goodwill could replace power. It cannot. Justice without strength is an illusion. Europe, and America, must relearn the discipline of self-preservation before history reminds us again why it matters.
