Friedrich Merz, the frontrunner to become Germany’s next leader, is “highly concerned” about recent developments in the United States under Donald Trump’s second presidency.
The German chancellor candidate told a rally in Singen on Wednesday night that “this is no longer the America we used to know,” amid the Trump administration’s major overhauls of the federal government.
“The way officials, the Department of Justice, the public prosecutors’ offices, the way they’re all being thrown out, the way they’re pardoning people who have been sentenced to years in prison, that will have consequences for America,” Merz cautioned.
Merz’s warning comes amid a whirlwind of personnel and agency slashes both within the U.S. federal government and to foreign aid since Trump took office. Since assuming the presidency, Trump’s administration has sent mass emails offering “deferred resignations” to all federal workers, sacked multiple federal watchdogs, and gotten rid of dozens of prosecutors who were involved in criminal cases related to the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol attack.
The country has also frozen foreign aid and announced moves to put nearly all staff members at the U.S. Agency for International Development on paid leave.
Trump has also announced ambitions to take control of the Gaza Strip, of Greenland and of the Panama Canal, not ruling out the use of military force.
Germans are set to vote in a snap election on Feb. 23, with Merz attempting to defend his polling lead over the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.
Elon Musk, the tech billionaire who has become a key figure in the Trump administration, has waded into German politics by encouraging Germans to vote for the AfD at a party rally at which he also said Germans should “move on” from “past guilt.”
Merz in December called Musk’s interventions in Germany “invasive and presumptuous” after the Tesla owner published an opinion in the Welt am Sonntag newspaper calling the AfD Germany’s “last spark of hope.”
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