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 complex negotiations with his party’s traditional centre-left rival to form a coalition government after ruling out the second-placed hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), said that it would be his “absolute priority” to strengthen Europe so it does not have to rely on Washington for its defence.
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”.
He also took aim at tech billionaire Elon Musk, Trump’s close ally and head of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, for intervening in the election campaign to support the AfD, which secured its best-ever result in a national poll.
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, doubling what it polled in 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 II.
The Greens won 85 seats, followed by the democratic socialist Die Linke, or The Left, with 64 seats and left-wing populist Bundnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) with one seat.
