Brexit is a ‘wake-up call’ for Europe, says Angela Merkel

German chancellor makes veiled comment that leaving the EU could lead to the UK losing international influence

Angela Merkel has said that Brexit is a “wake-up call” for the EU and Europe will need to start doing things differently.

In an interview with the Financial Times two weeks before Britain leaves, Germany’s chancellor said the bloc needed to up its game to compete.

She said that the EU must become more “attractive, innovative, creative, a good place for research and education... Competition can then be very productive.”

Ms Merkel has previously said little about Brexit. Last year, she broke her silence to say that Britain would be a potential competitor to the EU after it left.

In the interview, she defended the principles of the European project and issued a veiled warning that the UK could suffer from diminished influence outside the union.

“I see the European Union as our life insurance,” she said.

“Germany is far too small to exert geopolitical influence on its own, and that’s why we need to make use of all the benefits of the single market.”

Ms Merkel argued that international institutions such as the EU were “essentially a lesson learnt from the Second World War, and the preceding decades”, the memory of which is fading.

Germany’s leader since 2005 and a contemporary of Tony Blair, Ms Merkel is serving what she has said will be her last term as chancellor.

Having already stepped down as leader of the centre-right CDU party to make way for a successor, she has said she will not contest the next Bundestag elections, which are scheduled for 2021.