Vice President JD Vance told European leaders on Friday that their biggest security threat was not military aggression from Russia or China, but their own suppression of free speech — including efforts to block hard-right parties from joining governments. An audience that was largely expecting Mr. Vance to lay out the Trump administration’s priorities for…
A chorus of criticism greeted Friedrich Merz, the favorite to become Germany’s chancellor, last month when he broke a taboo against working with a hard-right party to pass legislation. But it was a lone voice of dissent that rocked the country’s political scene: Angela Merkel, the once-beloved former chancellor, who called Mr. Merz’s decision simply…
The man who has been heavily favored to become Germany’s next chancellor took an extraordinary gamble this week, both for his political future and his country’s longstanding firewall against political extremism. It did not go as he hoped. In an effort to portray himself and his party as tough on immigration, Friedrich Merz, the leader…
They are ripe for disruption. Well before Mr. Musk first backed the AfD, it had become the second most-popular party in Germany. The Social Democrats, the country’s oldest party which once routinely won more than 40 percent of the vote, are polling at a historic low of 16 percent ahead of next month’s election. The…
Elon Musk told a gathering of the hard-right Alternative for Germany party this weekend that the country has “too much of a focus on past guilt,” an apparent effort to wipe away the long shadow of the Nazis that has influenced generations of Germans to quarantine extreme political parties from public life. “It’s good to…
The man who is favored to be Germany’s next chancellor has opened the door to working with the Alternative for Germany to pass tough new immigration restrictions, potentially breaking a longstanding effort to shun a party whose flirtation with Nazi language has made it anathema to the political mainstream. The opening by Friedrich Merz, the…