In Munich, Trump’s vice president said the greatest threat to Europe “comes from within,” from leaders who have tried to keep the far right out of the corridors of power, and instead of meeting with the outgoing German chancellor he met with the AfD leader. JD Vance’s speech marked a point of no return in the EU’s relationship with the US and was a wake-up call for Germany, which goes to the polls this Sunday
“When it comes to JD Vance’s statements, this is basically what you can expect from the far right from now on, and we already see it on Elon Musk’s (ex-)Twitter all the time, just as we see it in Trump’s successive statements,” analyst Julien Hoez, geopolitics specialist and editor of The French Dispatch, tells CNN Portugal. “The reality people have to accept is that the Americans aren’t here to make life easier for us. They’re resisting, they’re isolationist, and they have this very strange revanchist style that’s shaping how the world is evolving.”
If there’s one thing Trump’s right-hand man’s speech made clear, it’s that “the Trump administration sees the European far right as its true ally,” writes Gideon Rachman. “By calling for parties like the AfD to be welcomed into governments, Vance is asking Europe to turn into an expanded version of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, a soft autocracy with a soft spot for Putin’s Russia.”
The idea is echoed by Julien Hoez, who says the message contained in this speech is “very simple” and easy to sum up. “The old world order is over and we’re in a new and dangerous order, one in which the Americans aren’t our friends, and this is increasing the pressure on Europe to focus on the equipment it produces and uses, on developing its own capabilities, instead of relying on America’s weapons or Russia’s gas.”
Will Merz manage to implement these reforms? Domestically, it remains to be seen. And at the European level, even with all the “positive signals” he has sent, the uncertainty also remains for now. “Let’s be honest: Scholz was a fairly weak chancellor, and Merz seems more combative, we saw that in the debates, where he rebuked Weidel for being pro-Russia,” Julien Hoez points out. “He’s very pro-EU and is taking the situation seriously, or at least he has been on the campaign trail. But where is this going to take us? We don’t know.”
The analyst invokes Mario Draghi’s recent remarks, who once again called on the EU to “do something.” “We have to do something if we want something to happen, otherwise we’re going to keep sinking,” Hoez notes. “But I don’t know whether Merz will be a better partner for Emmanuel Macron, who has fought hardest for EU reforms, or a better partner for the European Commission and Council, for Italy and others. What I do know is that we can’t keep waiting, we have to start acting now.”
Against a backdrop of growing geopolitical instability and unpredictability, accelerated by the posture of Trump and his entourage, Europe has its eyes fixed on Berlin, and particularly on Merz. The big question is whether the political novice, a lawyer with no prior political experience at this level, will have the strength, or the will, to launch the reforms the EU needs to make itself stronger.
“We have to find a way to give ourselves the power to be powerful. We’re 450 million people, the largest market in the world, we’ve survived for hundreds and hundreds of years, so why depend on a country half our size?” Julien Hoez concludes. “We have to rebuild our industry and our regulations to become the geopolitical power we can be, but to do that we need to reform the EU and have treaties that let us do what’s necessary, instead of being held hostage by Orbán’s Hungary and Fico’s Slovakia, which block everything and sabotage our efforts. If we keep waiting, things are only going to get worse.”