Friedrich Merz is set to become Germany’s most American chancellor.
Never in history has a German head of government had more affinity for the United States. Merz has traveled to the U.S. over 100 times, by his own tally, and counts former U.S. President Ronald Reagan as one of his role models.
Merz became a conservative member of the European Parliament in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell. Five years later he was elected to the German Bundestag, where he developed a close relationship with Wolfgang Schäuble, the CDU stalwart and forceful advocate of European Union integration. Under Schäuble’s tutelage, Merz rose in stature and was considered a likely choice for chancellor candidate.
His rise ended in 2002, however, when he lost a power struggle with the more centrist Angela Merkel.
Seeing no role for himself in the CDU under Merkel, Merz withdrew to the back benches, and in the midst of the world financial crisis of 2008 published a paean to free markets titled “Dare for More Capitalism.” A year later he left the Bundestag to work as a corporate lawyer while also taking the helm of Atlantik-Brücke, a lobby advocating transatlantic ties.
While with Atlantik-Brücke, Merz pushed for an EU-U.S. trade agreement — the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or TTIP — and forged closer connections with the U.S., networking with American politicians and corporate leaders.
Over a decade in the private sector, Merz sat on a series of corporate boards, including a four-year stint with U.S. asset manager BlackRock, a time he counts as among the happiest in his life, according to biographer Resing. Merz says this time provided him valuable experience outside of politics, but his critics accuse him of simply using his political connections to lobby for powerful interests, making himself a millionaire in the process.
Though Merz and his conservatives emerged victorious in Sunday’s election, surveys suggest he’s not particularly popular among the public.
In a country that remains deeply skeptical of the financial industry, Merz’s wealth and time at BlackRock, the American investment company, are often viewed with suspicion.
Merz has also vowed to make “deals” with Trump. In an interview last month he suggested Germany could endear itself to Trump by buying American F-35 fighter jets and boosting defense spending to put Germany consistently above the NATO spending target of 2 percent of gross domestic product. Despite the U.S. president’s love of tariffs, Merz also floated trying to bring back negotiations on TTIP, which collapsed during the first Trump administration.
In an interview the following day, Merz warned that Europe should prepare for Trump to end NATO protection and hinted at a major strategic shift, saying Germany needed to discuss the possibility of “nuclear sharing, or at least nuclear security” with European nuclear powers the United Kingdom and France. German conservatives have previously favored maintaining strong ties with the U.S. over calls from Paris to cultivate European “strategic autonomy.”
Merz has expressed a willingness to do so, but the way forward remains murky.
“Within this Europe, Germany must play a leading role,” Merz said at the rally in Hesse. “We must take on this responsibility. I, for one, am determined to do so.”>

Based on your hostile attitude and clear adherence to critical race theory, I fear that we will never agree on this topic, no matter how long we were to continue this discussion or how much reading I were to do. So I will start by letting you know this will be my last comment in this discussion. Feel free to further tear into me after this but I am exercising my right to stop participating in this discussion.
I am not under an obligation to answer for anything actually as this is not a court of law. This mentality alone does not make me hopeful for your vision of the future. Nevertheless, my answer is that I do not make a habit of debating people on the internet on this topic. I once had a somewhat related discussion on Reddit with someone on the Israel-Palestine question (although that was a number of years ago and my stance has shifted somewhat on that issue since) but nothing beyond that. I guess this was just something unresolved in my mind from 2020. I have done plenty of reading on politics since I first became familiar with these slogans but I never really ended up diving into this topic and I don’t think that really has a lot to do with being in a “network of whiteness”. Obviously, this is a more prominent topic in indigenous communities than for other Americans but that has little to do with " whiteness ".
I am pretty sure that even countries such as Cuba and China and other communist ruled places do in fact have law enforcement. So while there may be many grave issues with the American criminal justice system, I cannot consider complete abolition of the police to be anything but a crackpot idea of American anarchists.
How is that “strategy” supposed to lead to anything positive exactly?
So what you are saying is that there is no place for non-black/non-indigenous Americans within the current borders of the USA except under “black and indigenous sovereignty”, so much for any kind of democratic or peaceful outcome, I guess. And how exactly do you envision white Americans going " back" to Europe, except for a very small number who were born there or otherwise have European citizenship? Aside from the fact that your phrasing hints at what amounts to continental scale ethnic cleansing despite your assertion that that is “impossible”, most European countries are not going to welcome foreigners just because they apparently had an ancestor that was from there. Some countries are willing to give you citizenship if you can prove that one of your ancestors had that citizenship but AFAIK far from all.
Obviously, you can say what you mean when you are already in a position of power and not particularly worried about future accountability. If you are political marginalized at the moment, however, it is probably a better strategy to remain as vague as possible about contentious issues so you can appeal to largest amount of people possible. This is politics 101 really.
I think we both know that that sovereignty is quite limited compared to your vision. The reservations are still under the authority of the federal government, the most powerful government in the world even. And the reservations are still located in the territories of states that are much more powerful in many different respects. No one in their right mind believes that the reservations would be allowed to ethnically cleanse non-indigenous people if they wanted to do that unless those other governments decide to give them the legal authority to do so. Note that I never said that I believe the majority of indigenous people believe in your ideology or the rhetoric that I mentioned previously or that it is only indigenous people that do.
I don’t disagree with any of this.
I am familiar on a basic level with the history of the colonization of the Americas. I would like to remind you that the non-indigenous residents living within the borders of the present day US are, in fact also its inhabitants and not conquerorsh
I don’t disagree with this but none of this has anything to do with telling people to fuck off to a foreign country that they have virtually no connection to.
There is a difference between violence against power structures upholding the status quo/authorities (i.e. basically legitimate targets under the Geneva Conventions) and violence against civilians and I think you know that.
Are you seriously comparing random working class/middle class Americans who are not black or indigenous to slave owners?
This type of stuff is exactly why I have decided to not further participate in this discussion and why I do not get along with most of the American “left”. But who knows, maybe this toxicity and the obsession with race and other forms of identity politics is purely a result of American history and it could never have ended up any other way. Maybe you are right and after a long and horrible conflict (some form of) your vision will emerge from the ashes. I just know that there would be a lot of death and misery in between and that I (and along with me probably a fair number of people globally) will not consider that “justice”.
Nobody is saying we have to live with the status quo or that there does not have to be major restitution of some sort. But your vision of what seems to essentially amount to a black --indigenous dictatorship (with token representation of other ethnicities, I am sure) and everyone who disagrees being ethnically cleansed to other continents (because making them refugees is the only way that a majority of those people have any chance of being accepted by your desired receiving countries) is unlikely to be considered appealing or even acceptable by the vast, vast majority of the American population and probably much of the world.
If you are hoping to genuinely win people over (who are not gullible) rather than implement a vision almost exclusively through violence, you should probably care.
I think it may have been a mistake to subscribe to World News; I did not come to Lemmy to have these kinds of discussions. I should probably stick to less political communities in the future.
Finally, I apologize for accidentally hitting the reply button to soon.