The U.S. Stake in Germany's Election Shift to the Right
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Germany elects a new center-right leader who promptly says his goal is independence from the United States. Meanwhile, Vladimir Zelensky of Ukraine and Donald Trump and various Trump officials continue their war of words as Trump tilts towards Russia.

Paul Zhigo: Russia in the Ukraine conflict. What does all this mean for American alliances and the US national interest as the new president of the United States, Donald Trump, continues to shake up the world order a month since election day? That's our subject for today on Potomac Watch, the daily podcast of the Wall Street Journal opinion pages. I'm Paul Zhigo, editor of those pages, and I'm here with Joe Sternberg, our man in London, and Bill McGurn, who is our man in New York.

but sometimes spotted in New Jersey. So let's talk, Joe, about this big German election and why it matters to the United States. So what happened? Who is this fellow, Friedrich Merz, who's going to be the next chancellor, center-right party, Christian Democratic Party?

union leader. Tell us about it. He represents a shift to the right in German politics. Let's start with why anyone should care about this election. I mean, certainly Germany, largest economy in Europe, an economic engine for Europe, and also over the past few decades, an important ally of the US and a real anchor of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization Alliance. And so what happens there is

matters a lot to America and it matters a lot to Europe. And I think that the good news, such as it is from this election, is that Friedrich Merz is on a mission to try to revive the German economy and then also deal with a lot of the immigration issues that have been creating so much havoc in German and European politics over the past few years.

And those two issues are the reason that he is now likely to be chancellor. Those were the issues that drove the campaign. Yes. I think that, you know, the last time Germany had an election in 2021, you know, it was the end of the Anglo-American, woolly, centrist era that had lasted for 15 years. And German voters had decided to give a turn to

to this really unwieldy coalition of the center-left. It was the Social Democratic Party with Chancellor Olaf Scholz and a coalition with the Greens and the small free market party. And that fell apart at the end of last year because these parties couldn't agree on key issues like what they were going to do about the country's energy crisis, how they were going to try to get the economy back on track. Germany is now entering its third year of a recession.

industrial production has plummeted over the past few years, job losses are mounting. So with this election, what has happened is that voters have decided that they want to give an opportunity for the right to govern. And this is not Angela Merkel's centrist Christian Democratic Party. Friedrich Merz is

What Europeans call a liberal in America would call sort of a free market conservative. So I think that he's pledging tax reform. He's pledging deregulation to unstick the economy and then also the immigration control. But let me stop you there, Joe, because, okay, he may be promising all of that.

But yet we have results in the election which aren't definitive enough to allow the CDU and Merz to govern from the right because he's going to have to form a coalition government. The CDU and his partner, the CSU from Bavaria, have received less than 30% of the vote.

So they're going to have to form a coalition. It looks like they're going to have to form one with, believe it or not, the party, the SPD, that was just repudiated by the voters because of the unwieldy coalition you just described. So, I mean, this is bizarre. It would be as if Donald Trump won and he had to form a coalition government with Kamala Harris.

I mean, that sounds like another recipe for stasis, not for actual reform. Yeah. I mean, this is the big problem that has come out of this result. And it's a consequence of the fact that Germany, unlike the US or the UK, is a multi-party system. So they are accustomed to having a lot of relatively smaller parties in the parliament. And then you cobble together some group that can reach a governing majority of

seats in the Bundestag. And of course, the scrambling factor here is the other party on the right end of the political spectrum that won big in Sunday's election, and that is the alternative for Germany or AFD. And you would think looking at this situation from a

across the Atlantic and the US, that the logical thing to do would be for Friedrich Merz's Christian Democrats to form an alliance with the AFD because they do agree on paper on a lot of issues like the need for cutting taxes, for completely rethinking Germany's forced march toward green energy, which has been so destructive for the economy. The problem is the AFD comes with a lot of other baggage.

that they have elements within the party that have a bad habit of expressing various sympathies for Germany's Nazi past, which is absolutely a taboo in German politics as it ought to be. And that means that until or unless the AFD ever manages to purge those elements, no other mainstream party, including Friedrich Moze's Christian Democrats, is going to be willing to form a coalition with them.

So if you can't do that kind of coalition on the right for very good reasons, the downside is that you are stuck with an ungainly coalition with the Social Democrats. Now, I think that they can agree on some things that would be good for Germany. I think that the Social Democrats...

We're never super enthusiastic about some of the green climate agenda. So I think that there might be scope for some negotiation there, and that could do some good for the economy. I think that you might be able to negotiate with the Social Democrats on issues like immigration, where I think a lot of their Social Democratic voters are actually kind of conservative and might support Friedrich Merz if he wants to impose tighter border controls on illegal migration.

And those issues can solve some of the problems that have really been bothering German voters the past few years. But you're right, Paul, this does foreclose the opportunity to do some of the bigger bang economic reforms, like much bigger tax reforms or welfare reforms that Germany would really need.

Bill, let's get you in here. And I want to ask you about the AFD, the alternative for Deutschland, the German party, which has had its best result ever, 20, 21%. And they are a peculiar party, right? As Joe suggests, they have more free market impulses than the folks on the German left. On the other hand, they are pro-Russian and anti-American. And the puzzle here is why you

Elon Musk and J.D. Vance went out of their way. J.D. Vance, on his visit to the Munich Security Conference a couple weeks ago, to meet on the sidelines with the head of the AFD party, but not with the chancellor at the time, Olaf Scholz. So this was perceived as a direct intervention in the German election, a week away from an election, and not a helpful one.

And I guess one question is, do you think it had any effect on the election? Probably didn't, as it looks. Their interventions didn't. But the US comments by those two officials about the AFD has obscured some of the truth about what that party's all about. Yeah, I mean, it kind of made the US a factor in the elections that I don't think necessarily helped us. Look, everything's being upended in Europe, our NATO commitments and so forth.

And I think Trump has one thing that is correct on. The Europeans have not pulled their weight in their own defense. Their military spending is a lot smaller than it should be, their commitment, troops, and so forth. And he wants them to do better. But in the way that he's asked them to do better without the United States,

you know, we risk a whole new arrangement. Like now we're talking traditionally,

The European troops as a force in Europe were under NATO, where the US had a primary say, right, and directed them. I think that was healthy. But now if you say we're not bearing the burden, you have to do it, you know, who knows what arrangements are going to come up. I thought we were always opposed to a separate European Union force of troops, you know, that could rival ours.

So I think it's just open what it's going to look like. As Joe says, the fact that Germany is a multi-party democracy and coalition governments. So even though the Christian Democrats won, and I think that speaks well of their agenda,

As Joe pointed out, for different reasons, it's going to be very hard to implement that agenda. And I can see people becoming very disenchanted with the CDU if it can't give results. To me, primarily on immigration and kind of scaling back the extreme environmentalism

that has really crippled the German economy and so forth. So things are being rewritten on the ground, and we don't know what final form that will take. All right, we're going to take a break. And when we come back, we're going to talk about the implications of the German election for reform in that country when we come back.

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Welcome back. I'm Paul as you go here on Potomac Watch, the daily podcast of the Wall Street Journal opinion pages with Bill McGurn and Joe Sternberg. When you have a centrist coalition that doesn't work, as the last couple of coalitions in Germany have not, the only alternative, the only opposition is the fringes and they tend to gain. So the AFD is sitting on the sidelines waiting for failure if the Merz coalition, however it is formed,

cannot deliver good results. But Joe, I want to zero in on some of the comments by Merz after the election regarding the US. And he said, "The interventions from Washington were no less dramatic and drastic and ultimately outrageous than interventions we have seen from Moscow." So that's really striking. And then he said, "My absolute priority

will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that step by step we can really achieve independence from the USA. I would never have believed that I would have to say something like that on television, but at the very least, after Donald Trump's statements last week, it is clear that the Americans, at least this part of the Americans in this administration, are largely indifferent to the fate of Europe and America.

Now, hearing that from a leader of the European left might not have been surprising, but to hear that from a leader of the German right, center right, is surprising and notable. And it's clear that whatever the impact of the last two weeks have been on the German election,

they really have had a seismic impact on Merit and I think on a lot of other leaders across Europe. Yeah, I mean, and to point out, hearing something like that from any French politician also wouldn't be surprising. Right, going back to de Gaulle, yeah, exactly. And I think that that actually is the key point because I think that a lot of European countries have often had very divided attitudes toward America and partly that has tended historically to be a right-left-right

divide. Although German mainstream parties have tended at the end of the day to be much more pro-American than you might see in other countries around Europe, it was still the case that certainly the Christian Democrats in Germany had been a bulwark

of this sense that the relationship with America is crucial for Germany's well-being and for Europe's well-being. And that this is something that they should really cultivate. And I think that Friedrich Merz is very much historically has been aligned with that view. So if we now find ourselves in a situation where a politician like him

from a party like his party is making statements like that. That's a sign that some pretty serious changes are afoot and that this is a result of some poor decision-making coming out of Washington. And I think that we really do need to

emphasize how badly they took these interventions from Elon Musk and JD Vance before the election, because it's just the weirdness of throwing this American weight behind such an anti-American pro-Russian party as the AFD. And at the same time, when America's traditional friends in German politics

were working so hard to consolidate their own electoral voice. I think as a former French president once said in a different context, J.D. Vance and Elon Musk missed a good opportunity to stay quiet in the last weeks of that election. Yeah, I think that whatever you think of Vance's comments in particular, and they did have a certain virtue in that they did tell certain truths to Europeans about their defense spending and about

some of their tolerance for opposition voices. The intervention a week before the election was really remarkable and unappreciated. And then when you combine it, Bill, with all of the comments about Ukraine and Trump's tilt, I think it's impossible not to call it a tilt towards Russia, particularly when the US is refusing to, and Trump officials are refusing to say that

Russia actually is the aggressor in Ukraine, which is a simply flat out hysterical falsehood. When you're refusing to do that, I think the allies, whatever you think about their defense spending, they are looking back and saying, whoa, I guess this means that maybe we simply cannot defend.

rely on the Americans. And when you reach that kind of conclusion, what happens is they begin to make their own calculations about their self-interest and their survival. And the Trump folks might say, well, it's about time, Paul. We can no longer in America sustain support for NATO and for European defense. And Ukraine isn't in our security interests in any case.

case. I would disagree with both of those premises, but that seems to be the basis of some of Trump's foreign policy beliefs. But that has consequences, and it's going to have consequences for the alliance. And the bigger question I have is, are we watching right before our eyes the unraveling of the transatlantic alliance after all of these decades? Well, we're certainly seeing chips in it. As you mentioned,

I mean, I think what makes Donald Trump different, again, he's right to complain. The Europeans need to do more, both in spending and troops and in relations with Russia. They need to do more. And the difference is he seems to be willing to risk it all. Like when he says you're on your own,

I think people in Europe get the impression he's really leaving it to us. You know, he's going to leave us on our own if we're not careful. And look, that leads to all sorts of things. I thought Zelensky made a huge mistake last year when he campaigned with Democrats in

Pennsylvania, a swing state before the election. And you know Trump was going to notice that, right? And hold it against him. He already didn't like. So there are a lot of mistakes when you get into the actual politics of other countries. You know, I'm hoping it wakes the Europeans up and we avoid it. But I don't know whether it would bother Trump to see the NATO alliance busted up or at least

become kind of ineffectual, not the way it was. And if I were Donald Trump in the US, I think US interests are better served than European forces under NATO, than separate forces and all things. Look at what they're doing now. Imagine if they had troops and a different alliance to go their own way. I think that that could be chaos for the United States. So we don't know where all this is going. You know,

The president's defenders would say, at the end of the day, this is just negotiating tactics, and we're going to solidify the old regime, just force them to wake up. You know, sometimes you don't have control over the consequences of your actions. We're going to take another break, and when we come back, we'll talk about the impact on America's allies of

the last couple of weeks of statements by American officials, and are they alienating those allies when we come back?

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Welcome back. I'm Paul as you go here on Potomac Watch with Joe Sternberg and Bill McCurran. I'm not so sure this is just negotiation, Joe. I think that there's

a big part of Donald Trump that really doesn't like forward deployments of American forces that would just be happy to withdraw troops. Remember, in the first term, he tried to withdraw troops from Germany. He became really frustrated with deployments in Eastern Europe and in South Korea. So I think this is a little bit of an unknown territory here. And I think we'll see how it comes down. But

I think that Bill's point about unintended consequences is important. And I would just point to, you combine the Mertz talking points after the election, his views about independence from America. You combine that with Ukraine and how the Europeans are shocked at the seeming indifference to Ukraine's future by Trump. And then there was an interesting piece two weeks ago

in the wake of Trump's tariff threats on Canada and Mexico by a couple of intellectuals from the Conservative Party in Canada, that is, and advisors, intellectual advisors to the Conservative Party pointing out that their conclusion is that the U.S. is in...

decline and retreat from the world, and that that will be a signature element of Trump and his intellectual coterie of advisors, and that Canada has to act accordingly. Now, they didn't flesh out in that piece what Canada would have to do, but the implication I think is

find more economic partners who are not America, and spend more money on defense, Joe? Yeah. I mean, I think that this is becoming a very unstable situation. And I think that one of the mistakes that Americans can be in danger of making when they look at the rest of the world is to think that other countries will always recognize that at the end of the day, it is in their interest to get along with the US. I think that there can be that

about Europe. And my sense is that that often is motivating a lot of what we see coming out of the Trump administration, the sense that, you know, Trump and J.D. Vance and a bunch of the rest of that group think that if they bully Europe enough, Europeans at the end of the day will realize that they have to take it and adapt to whatever the U.S. wants them to do. And that's not true. I mean, I think that it has often been the case in the post-war period that there have been large groups

of European politics and societies that did understand that their countries benefited from the alliance with the US. But there have also been a lot of anti-American forces within politics in these countries. And we shouldn't be

needlessly emboldening those forces because, I mean, there is so much that the US cannot control about what happens in the politics of countries, even our allies. We shouldn't go out of our way to encourage or help the forces within those political systems

who are going to be antagonistic toward us. And that includes the AFD in Germany. All right, Joe, you get the last word. Thank you to Bill and Joe. We are here on Potomac Watch every day of the week, and we sure hope you're with us as well. Thanks for listening.