Confession on Russian gas from Merkel’s advisor

Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s top economic adviser has acknowledged that her policies left Germany overly dependent on Russian gas and that, in retrospect, much more should have been done to diversify the country’s energy supply.

“If we had known then what we know now, we would of course have acted differently,” Lars-Hendrik Röller told the Financial Times. Röller said that at that time Russia’s abundant and cheap energy exports provided great support to the German economy, helping it grow for 10 consecutive years.

‘Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to grow as much’

“Russian gas has helped us achieve strong growth rates over the last 10 to 15 years that we would not have had otherwise,” Röller said. “These were things that would not have been possible otherwise,” he said.

Röller also insisted that Merkel, who was chancellor from 2005 to 2021, had no choice but to invest heavily in Russian gas following her decision to abandon nuclear energy.

“Whether this is true or not can be debated, but that was the social consensus of the time,” Röller said.

‘WE HAVE BEEN DEPENDENT ON RUSSIAN GAS’

Röller also stated: “But the result is that we end up depending quite a bit on Russian gas; “This is a fact,” he said.

When Russia began its war in Ukraine in February 2022, it supplied 55 percent of Germany’s gas imports.

Since the start of the war, Olaf Scholz’s government has withdrawn Germany from Russian gas, built several LNG terminals and taken steps to expand renewable energy capacity.