The victorious CDU leader is likely to be more proactive on the European stage. He will also need to forge broad alliances at home to see off the far right<\/p>\n
Friedrich Merz, the leader of Germany\u2019s centre-right Christian Democratic Union party (CDU), has a reputation for being blunt. On Sunday evening, as it became clear that the CDU had won<\/a> the snap election triggered by the outgoing Social Democrat chancellor, Olaf Scholz, he did not disappoint. \u201cFor me,\u201d said Mr\u00a0Merz in a post-election television debate, \u201cthe absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA.\u201d<\/p>\n As recently as a fortnight ago, such a statement from a German chancellor-elect would have been inconceivable. But these are new and extraordinary times. A convinced transatlanticist<\/a>, Mr Merz has previously played down the dangers to western unity posed by Donald Trump. But crude electioneering on behalf of the extreme right Alternative f\u00fcr Deutschland (AfD) by the US president\u2019s outriders<\/a>, and the sidelining of Europe and Kyiv from negotiations over the future of Ukraine, have forced a handbrake turn.<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The victorious CDU leader is likely to be more proactive on the European stage. He will also need to forge broad alliances at home to see off the far right Friedrich Merz, the leader of Germany\u2019s centre-right Christian Democratic Union party (CDU), has a reputation for being blunt. On Sunday evening, as it became clear … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34239","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34239"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34239\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}