None of the choices she made to handle the Greek crisis would have changed if she could turn back the clock, says Angela Merkel, exactly ten years after the dramatic summer of 2015 and while she is out of central politics.

In an interview with SKAI and Alexis Papachelas, the former German chancellor spoke at length about how she lived through that period and in response to questions from a journalist, she claimed she would not apologise to the Greeks, but would say “thank you” to them for holding on and keeping the country within the eurozone.

She said she was hurt by the fact that the Greek press of the time, as well as the protesters, associated her with Nazism. But she was also hurt, she said, by the fact that she heard that Greeks were lazy, “it’s this, it’s that”: you cannot, she said, judge a people based on stereotypes, since that is not the way to see and solve the problem.

“No, I wouldn’t apologize because I thought something had to change and that I couldn’t change Greek politics. This had to be done internally. But I would like to say that I understand and thank all those who have taken on such a burden to stay in the eurozone and in this way have done Europe a good service. We stayed united in this difficult situation.

So I wanted to thank you and to say that I was fully aware of what many people were going through,” the former German Chancellor said when asked if she would apologize to the Greeks for what they went through.

Angela Merkel also said it hurt her to hear that Greeks were lazy and could not judge an entire nation based on stereotypes: ‘There are no Greeks and Germans. Just as, unfortunately, there are corrupt German companies, there were some Greek ones. Similarly, there are fewer and fewer hard-working Germans and Greeks. I have to look at each case individually. If I start judging an entire nation based on some stereotype, then I have failed and cannot solve any problem. Of course, it also hurt me when someone said that Greeks are this and that.

Of course, and the Greek people back then were saying that the Germans were always stingy and corrupt. We had a problem before us, and it was in Greece’s interest to solve this problem. I don’t like these generalizations at all.”