Friedrich Merz’s conservatives won the German election last month with 28.5% of the vote and now face the challenge of forming a governing coalition in the Bundestag. Despite their victory, the historically pro-American center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) under Merz has signaled a major shift in German foreign policy. Rather than reaffirming transatlantic ties, Merz declared that his priority was to achieve “independence from the USA.” If even a standard center-right conservative German chancellor is openly advocating for European autonomy, it raises serious questions about the “length” of America’s alliances.
This deterioration in relations is tied to the growing influence of far-right, pro-Russian parties across the West, such as the endlessly controversial Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which came in second with 20.8% of the vote, doubling its last electoral performance and marking the best performance by a German far-right party since the Nazis. Meanwhile, the Center-Left Social Democrats (SPD) suffered the worst defeat in their 150-year history (besides when elections were suspended by Hitler) with just 16.4% of the vote, while the Greens also saw significant losses. On the left, Die Linke experienced a surprising resurgence following the defection of Sahra Wagenknecht and her more culturally conservative but still economically left-wing faction.
Despite Merz building nearly his whole career as an ardent Atlanticist, his embrace of European strategic autonomy comes as a massive policy shift. Now equating U.S. involvement in the German election with Russian interference, he stated, “The interventions from Washington were no less dramatic and drastic and ultimately outrageous than the interventions we have seen from Moscow.” His remarks were not in a vacuum and were referencing interference by high-profile American figures, including Vice President J.D. Vance and billionaire and President-Donald-Trump-handler Elon Musk, who openly supported the AfD. Musk, in particular, presented virtually on stage at an AfD rally, where he endorsed the party and, in reference to the Holocaust, stated that Germans spend “frankly too much of a focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that.”
The American right’s involvement in European politics has been paradoxically in favor of “alternative right” parties and nationalist movements like the AfD, Spain’s Vox, Britain’s Reform, Brothers of Italy and France’s Reconquest (who all received invitations to Trump’s inauguration). They share a common purpose in weakening transnational alliances like the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), increasing the skepticism many traditional European conservative leaders like Merz have about U.S. reliability.
Despite these open attempts from Republican-aligned figures in Trump’s orbit to bolster the far-right AfD (a party the CDU refuses to work with) and Merz’s current statements regarding U.S. leadership, Trump still bizarrely congratulated the CDU’s victory as a triumph for his own movement. “MUCH LIKE THE USA, THE PEOPLE OF GERMANY GOT TIRED OF THE NO COMMON SENSE AGENDA, ESPECIALLY ON ENERGY AND IMMIGRATION,” he posted on Truth Social, claiming it was a “GREAT DAY FOR GERMANY, AND FOR THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA UNDER THE LEADERSHIP OF A GENTLEMAN NAMED DONALD J. TRUMP.” Trump’s attempt to frame the CDU’s victory as a win for his movement suggests either complete delusion in “Trumpworld,” the complete abandonment of any meaningful foreign policy coherence or both.
The irony of this situation is that Trump’s “America First” policy has rapidly transformed into “America Alone,” or an America with waning global influence. His administration’s disregard for the United States Agency for International Development’s soft power, his squandering of the benefits of free trade through his incomprehensible tariff policy and his indifference towards Europe as a whole — most notably displayed for all of European leaders to see during Trump’s insulting Oval Office confrontation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy — has left even Germany’s historically pro-American conservatives questioning whether the U.S. remains a reliable partner. Talk of NATO’s dissolution is no longer a fringe idea. Merz has warned that Europe may soon need to establish its own security framework, independent of both the U.S. and its domineering and now seriously unreliable role in NATO. Meanwhile, French President Emmanuel Macron’s calls for a “European Army” to counter Russia no longer seem like a pipe dream. Trump’s disregard for Ukrainian security has only reinforced fears across European capitals that America is no longer a defender of post-World War ll alliances, but a destabilizing force within them.
What remains to be seen is whether this shift in Germany will lead to genuine European strategic autonomy or simply a drift toward another sphere of influence. The rise of the AfD and its pro-Russian sympathies, combined with Merz’s disavowal of American influence, could upend decades of European security architecture. If Germany, Europe’s “economic engine,” moves further away from the U.S., it will force a reckoning not just for NATO but for the structure of the EU itself.
While some American conservatives celebrate an imagined ideological victory in Germany, their revived “isolationist” tendencies and far-right ideological alliances are and will continue to leave the U.S. increasingly sidelined. But maybe that’s Trump’s plan; who could tell? The question is no longer whether Trump’s America can lead the West — it shouldn’t and is incapable of doing so — but whether America can even maintain relevance within it in the years and administrations to come.
Andrew McDonald, FCRH ’26, is a history and political science major from Sacramento, Calif.
