Sir Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz have become adept at scrambling to deal with the latest bad news from Washington. Their meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Downing Street on Monday was so hastily arranged that Mr Macron needed to be back in Paris by late afternoon to meet Croatia’s prime minister, while Mr Merz was due on television for an end-of-year Q&A with the German public. But diplomatic improvisation alone cannot fully answer Donald Trump’s structural threat to European security. The US president and his emissaries are trying…
Tag: Friedrich Merz
The Guardian view on Germany under Merz: Europe’s powerhouse is still struggling | Editorial
Last March, following angst-ridden months as Europe came to terms with Donald Trump’s return to the White House, financial markets in Paris, Milan and Berlin were gripped by a surge of optimism. The cause was a historic deal brokered by Friedrich Merz, then Germany’s chancellor-elect, which loosened constitutional spending constraints in the EU’s powerhouse nation. Here at last, it was hoped, was the fiscal kickstart required to end a prolonged period of economic stagnation, and mitigate geopolitical headwinds blowing from the US and China. Six months into Mr Merz’s premiership,…