You operated very courageously and in admitting large numbers of
particularly Syrian migrants in the wake of the Syrian war
into Germany, there was a political cost to it.
It was not always popular, even within your own party,
but you felt as if this was the right thing
to do.
But I thought at the time, we cannot simply give
Sunday speeches saying how much we respect human rights, how
much we respect human dignity.
And then all these people come who seek century and
we tell them no.
For you we don't have room, We we don't have
this heart.
But I also knew that we cannot take every day
or every week 10 thousands of refugees.
I also knew that there were human traffickers sending these
people to Europe.
So we needed to address this at the root cause.
What lessons you learned about how to both think about
Germany and you have to deal with your legislature, the
Bundesbank, at the same time as you're also responsible for
helping make sure that the EU as a whole was
able to weather this storm.
I was such a great champion of of market economy
and I came from a socialist, a command economy.
I had hoped that companies would work responsibly.
I had to discover that the banks with their machinations
brought the world to the brink.
And in the end, the states needed to step in
to save the situation.
So I did have to find a way forward which
would save the euro, but would still would not mean
a sort of a communitarization of our debt.
And that was very hard to understand because we're a
union, a community, but we're not a state.
And this difference, I think, made it difficult for outsiders
to understand.
But in the end, I think at the end of
the day, we manage it quite well.