Germany faces a world of change as the far right waits in the wings

Friedrich Merz of the CDU is set to win today but Donald Trump’s presidency means he faces historic challenges, writes Deborah Cole in Berlin

- Deborah Cole in Berlin

German voters go to the polls today but it's a different world to when the campaign began only a few weeks ago.

Nearly 60 million people are choos-ing a government that will have to grapple with the breakdown of the transatlantic alliance under Donald Trump and new threats to European security just as the country's vaunted economic model is hitting the skids.

If the polls are correct, the man leading that administration will be conservative opposition chief Friedrich Merz, a corporate lawyer with a decades-long desire to be chancellor despite never serving in government. His in-tray will be staggering. "The big expectations mirror the big chal-lenges he'll face from day one of his likely chancellorship," news weekly Der Spiegel said. "An aggressive Russia, a hostile America and a Europe that is drifting apart: Merz could be tested more strongly [...] than any chancellor of the postwar republic."

Merz recently admitted that Trump's effective abandonment of European defence pledges and his vice-president JD Vance's aggressive backing of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) heralded "tectonic shifts in the political and economic power centres of the world". Germany, he said, would not emerge unscathed.

Trump's undermining of Nato and betrayal of Ukraine are "a punch to the gut", said Ursula Münch, director of the Academy for Political Education thinktank in Bavaria, particularly for Merz's Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which has "solidarity and friendship with the US deep in its DNA". "The biggest challenge [for Ger-many] will be mustering a united show of strength by the EU and the UK."

Germany, the world's third largest economic power and most populous EU country, was already struggling with the muddled legacy of Angela Merkel, one of Merz's predecessors as CDU leader and his longtime nemesis.