Germany’s Merz calls for ‘independence’ from US as conservatives win vote

Germany’s Friedrich Merz has pledged to achieve “independence” from the United States after his centre-right alliance won parliamentary elections held amid doubts about US President Donald Trump’s commitment to Europe’s security.

Merz, who faces tricky negotiations with his Christian Democratic Union’s historic rival to form a coalition government after ruling out cooperation with the second-placed hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), said on Sunday that it would be his “absolute priority” to strengthen Europe so it does not have to rely on Washington for its defence.

“I never thought I would have to say something like that on a TV programme but after Donald Trump’s latest comments in the last week, it is clear that the Americans, or at least this portion of the Americans, this government, care very little about the fate of Europe,” the chancellor-in-waiting told a televised roundtable of political leaders.

Merz said he was not sure that NATO would exist in its “current form” by the time of the next meeting of the transatlantic military alliance in June, “or whether we will have to establish an independent European defence capability much more quickly”.

“That is my absolute priority, I have no illusions at all about what will come out of America,” Merz said.

Merz also took aim at tech billionaire Elon Musk, Trump’s cost-cutting tsar and close ally, for intervening in the election campaign to support the AfD, which secured its best-ever result in a national poll.

“The interventions from Washington were no less dramatic and impertinent than the interventions we have seen from Moscow, so we are under massive pressure from two sides,” Merz said.

Merz’s Christian Democratic Union-Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) alliance won 208 seats with 28.6 percent of the vote in Sunday’s election, preliminary results showed, followed by the AfD with 152 seats and 20.8 percent of the vote – a doubling of its result at the last election.

Outgoing Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s centre-left Social Democratic Party (SDP), which had governed in a widely unpopular three-party coalition, took 120 seats, its worst result since the end of World World Two.