Merz can handle enmity from a Trump-Putin entente

Shortly after the German election polls closed Sunday, Elon Musk placed a congratulatory call — but not to conservative leader Friedrich Merz, who will become Germany’s next chancellor. Instead, he was eager to speak with Alice Weidel, the head of the anti-American, anti-Ukraine, pro-Putin, hard-right Alternative for Germany party, several of whose leading lights downplay Nazi crimes and are considered extremists by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency. With 20% of the total votes, the AfD, as the party is known, had doubled its share since the last German election. The good news is that, despite outrageous election interference by Musk (who urged Germans to vote AfD and interviewed Weidel on his social media platform X) and by Vice President JD Vance’s pro-AfD speech at the Munich Security Conference this month, Weidel’s party did less well than expected. Equally critical, businessman-turned-politician Merz, a strong supporter of close transatlantic ties, quickly grasped that the tight postwar bond between Germany and the United States has been sundered by President Donald Trump’s new alliance with Moscow. And believe me, the warp speed of Trump’s rejection of America’s closest allies over the past two weeks in favor of a Kremlin war criminal is not easy to grasp.

The bad news is that Europe urgently needs Merz to lead a united effort to stand up to Trump and his embrace of Moscow, his tariff obsession, and his abandonment of Ukraine. But the deep domestic problems Merz faces in Germany will make such a role dicey. Moreover, Musk, Vance and Trump himself appear eager to undercut Berlin at every turn. The new German leader has already spoken bluntly on national television about the challenges he faces. “I have no illusions about what is happening in America,” he said Monday. “Just look at recent events, including Elon Musk’s interventions in the German election campaign. This is unprecedented. The interventions from Washington were no less dramatic and brazen than those we have seen from Moscow.” Indeed, the U.S. voted with Russia, North Korea, and Iran against the Europeans and most of the U.N. General Assembly in a vote Monday condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine three years ago.

Merz added that Germany was under pressure “from both sides” — an astonishing equivalence of antipathy from both Washington and Moscow. His “absolute priority,” he continued, would be “to establish unity in Europe” as quickly as possible “so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA.”

“I never thought I would have to say something like that on a TV program, but after Donald Trump’s latest comments in the last week, it’s clear ... this government cares very little about the fate of Europe,” Merz told his German audience. This puts an enormous burden on Europe’s richest, largest country to help coordinate fellow European democracies in filling the huge gap in aid to Ukraine if Trump cuts off all US support. The Europeans have discussed sending a peacekeeping force to Ukraine after any ceasefire, yet Trump has cut them and Ukraine out of US-Russian negotiations. Every European official I spoke with at the Munich Security Conference insisted that such a force would be toothless unless it had intelligence and logistical backing from the United States, which has capacities Europe lacks. However, Trump told visiting French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday he didn’t “think you’re going to need much backing.” In other words, he is ready to leave Russia with a free hand to break any ceasefire deal — as it did after invading the Crimean Peninsula in 2014 — and to reinvade at will.

Before even taking power, Mertz must negotiate a coalition agreement between his Christian Democratic Union alliance and the Social Democratic Party of outgoing Chancellor Olaf Scholz, which finished third. Germany has been in the economic doldrums after energy prices spiked in 2022 following the shutdown of Russian oil and gas imports. Its industries are hurting from Chinese competition, and its infrastructure aging. And it is vulnerable to Trump’s tariff threats. So Merz will have to sell his hoped-for rise in defense spending to his public, which may prefer butter to guns, despite continuing strong German support for Ukraine. That stronger defense will be vital: Trump’s kowtow to Russia over Ukraine will surely make Putin bolder in hybrid warfare against Europe. Merz knows this to be true, especially since Trump is likely to turn his back on NATO, leaving the European allies to face an emboldened Putin alone.

To make matters worse, as Merz recognized, Trump’s team seems bent on pressing Merz to bring the AfD into a governing coalition. Never mind that all mainstream German political parties have a so-called firewall against aligning with the hard-right party because it downplays Nazi history and plays up racism. “There is no room for firewalls,” Vance thundered in Munich. Musk was even more aggressive on X in his enthusiasm for a future AfD government. “At this rate of growth, @AfD will be the majority party by the next election,” he wrote. When I spoke to the director of the German Council on Foreign Relations, Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff, in Berlin, his fear was that Musk and Vance, with Trump’s backing, would go all out to “build an alliance with pro-Putin parties in Europe.” Vance’s speech, he said, had redefined U.S. values so they were “no longer based on universalistic principles” of human rights and rule of law. Instead, they have become “transactional,” with great powers out to grab what they can. Thus, the Trump team is promoting a hard-right nationalist party whose leading figures downplay the crimes of Hitler’s SS, call for the mass deportation of immigrants, and even deporting German citizens descended from migrants. The party will not repudiate a deputy party leader who famously compared Hitler’s rule to “a spot of fly poop” on Germany’s great history. Attracted by strongmen leaders, they want to lift sanctions on Moscow and resume gas imports from Russia.

With its new strength, the AfD is expected to use its numbers to turn debate in the Bundestag, the German parliament, into more of an angry, ugly circus, much as MAGA legislators have done in the US Congress. No doubt encouraged every step of the way by virtual copresident Musk, who seems to share their values. Let us hope incoming chancellor Merz can handle superhuman challenges from the new entente of Washington and Moscow, along with his troubled home front — and do so simultaneously — because Germany and Europe are now the prime defenders of the democratic values Trump seeks to destroy.

Meanwhile, Germany’s conservative CDU/CSU bloc under chancellor-in-waiting Friedrich Merz and the Social Democrats are set to start exploratory talks on a coalition on Friday, said people familiar with the matter. Each side is expected to be represented by nine negotiators, according to the people, who asked not to be identified as the talks aren’t public. Both parties agreed on confidentiality about the content, process and location of the talks. Merz has said he’ll move quickly to form a government after his party won Sunday’s federal election with a result that will require him to form a coalition. An alliance with the Social Democrats — which are coming off their worst electoral result since World War II — would be the fastest way to form a government. Any other option would require at least one more party to secure a voting majority in parliament, and would take more time.

Tribune News Service