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“When it comes to actually fighting for gender equality — to making it part of her agenda — she is really not championing it,” Anne Wizorek, a German feminist and writer, told me.

And yet the shift in tone is significant. Merkel is an intentional and careful politician. Wide-ranging, sit-down interviews are rare for her; agreeing to this interview and these topics was a deliberate decision. So what is she trying to accomplish?

Merkel is in the end stages of her political career, and in many ways she is in a unique position: After handing off leadership of the Christian Democrats to Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer last month, she retains the power and bully pulpit of the chancellery without being subject to the day-to-day concerns of party politics.

Depending on your perspective, Merkel is either notoriously or appropriately cautious as a politician; if she has avoided embracing her gender up until now, it is because she worried it would weaken her political standing. But Merkel has no elections left to win — and, in fact, knows that her likeliest successor is another woman, Kramp-Karrenbauer. And attitudes toward feminism, once seen as a radical concept in postwar West Germany, have, while still complicated, begun to shift in recent years.

Photo by Markus Schreiber/AP

Her comments to Die Zeit come at a time in which Merkel, and everyone else, is already considering her legacy. Though the central questions surrounding that legacy don’t actually have much to do with gender — was Merkel the chief defender of liberal democracy, for example, or the one whose actions created the conditions for the forces challenging it? — her role as a female politician will surely figure into such discussions, and her acknowledgment that, although “automatic,” she has contributed to women’s equality could be an attempt to shape that narrative while still in office.