Angela Merkel’s policy of maintaining good relations with Moscow during her tenure as the German chancellor was by no means wrong, her successor, Olaf Scholz, told the news agency dpa on Sunday.
He admitted, though, that he considered Germany’s overreliance on Russian energy supply to be a mistake.
When asked if Germany was too friendly to Russia under Merkel, Scholz defended his predecessor’s position by saying that his own stance on the issue was “close” to hers. “An attempt to [achieve] reconciliation can never be wrong and neither can an attempt to get along peacefully,” he said.
Scholz, who was finance minister and vice-chancellor in Merkel’s fourth – and last – government, still criticized Germany’s energy policy, which had been too heavily reliant on Russian supplies, in his opinion. “It was a mistake of the German economic policy that we focused too much on our energy supply from Russia, without building the necessary infrastructure so that we could have reorganized [supplies] quickly if the worse came to worst,” he said.