Election fever grows ....but Trump is pulling the strings

The machinations of Elon Musk andthe returning US president loom large in minds of politicians and voters

- Deborah Cole

A Donald Trump-shaped shadow is looming over the campaign for Germany's snap elections next month, with unprecedented US interference on behalf of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland and a startling degree of attention from the incoming US administration scrambling the political landscape.

Trump's second term is forcing all parties to revamp fundamental stances, with responses ranging from opportunistic fealty to still wan-looking resistance. The stakes for Berlin could hardly be higher.

"Trump's rise and the turn towards authoritarianism and illiberalism in the US is a psychological challenge for a German elite that has always seen it as a democratic ally and model," said historian Ned Richardson-Little of the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam.

Veteran political observer Wolfgang Ischinger, a former German ambassador to Washington, has long compared US ties to an "umbilical cord", with Germany the dependent infant.

Germany's position as the EU's top economic power and its outsize security dependence on Washington made Trump's inauguration a day of reckoning.

"Trump's electoral victory alone has already shifted the European political landscape," political scientist Paula Diehl of Kiel university said, leading to an era of new "tensions and insecurities" for Germany.