Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said on Thursday that Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel was the foreign leader he admires and would like to emulate.
The news comes as a surprise considering how often he’s criticized Merkel during the course of his campaign, including her decision to accept thousands of refugees into Germany.
“Well, I think Merkel is a really great world leader, but I was very disappointed that — when she — this move with the whole thing on immigration,” Trump said on Thursday. “I was always a Merkel person, I thought really fantastic, but I think she made a very tragic mistake a year-and-a-half ago.”
It’s unclear why Trump wants to emulate a foreign leader who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for her work settling refugees in Europe. But this isn’t the first time Trump has praised her.
“Germany’s like sitting back silent collecting money and making a fortune with probably the greatest leader in the world today, Merkel,” he told TIME last year. “She’s fantastic. Highly respected.”
After Merkel was nominated as TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year, Trump tweeted that she was “ruining” Germany.
I told you @TIME Magazine would never pick me as person of the year despite being the big favorite They picked person who is ruining Germany
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 9, 2015
Merkel was criticized in July of last year when she responded to a young Palestinian girl’s plea against deportation with “politics is sometimes hard.” But shortly after, Merkel opened Germany’s borders to migrants and refugees. She’s since been fighting to get Europe to accept refugee resettlement, at home and throughout the continent, particularly in eastern Europe, where leaders have stoked anti-Muslim and xenophobic sentiment against the refugees.
Trump, who has repeatedly called for a ban on Muslims entering the United States, has used her acceptance of refugees and migrants as a stick to swipe at Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
“Hillary Clinton wants to be America’s Angela Merkel, and you know what a disaster this massive immigration has been to Germany and the people of Germany. Crime has risen to levels that no one thought would they would ever see,” Trump said in August. “We have enough problems in our country, we don’t need another one.”
For her part, Clinton also said she admires Merkel on Thursday. “I think she has been an extraordinary, strong leader during difficult times in Europe,” Clinton said aboard the campaign plane. She added that she likes “a lot of world leaders” but that Merkel was “one of my favorites.”
On Wednesday, Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson was asked a similar question. He struggled to name a single foreign leader and said he was having an “Aleppo moment,” referencing an earlier interview when he seemed to never have heard of the destruction and humanitarian crisis in Syria’s largest city. After stumbling for a bit and receiving help from his vice presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld, he landed on Vicente Fox, Mexico’s president from 2000 to 2006. Weld, however, also said his favorite foreign leader was Angela Merkel.