Donald Trump has a good chance of winning the race for the US presidency. Germany is facing turbulent times.
It was an emotional rollercoaster for many people in Germany. At the end of 2020, the current US President Joe Biden won the presidential election against Donald Trump. As a result, an angry mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in Washington in January 2021, before Biden promised US allies at his inauguration that the United States would now become a reliable partner internationally again. Relief, a moment of terror and then the big sigh of relief.
He – Donald Trump – was gone and certainly not a few in German politics thought that everything would go back to the way it was before the Republican. Unity, mutual trust. Trump’s hostility towards Germany, his protectionism, his trade war against Europe and his questioning of Western alliances such as NATO are still unforgotten.
Accordingly, quite a few people breathed a sigh of relief after Trump’s election defeat. Who would have thought that the former US president would run again in the upcoming presidential election on November 5, 2024 and that he actually had a good chance of beating current Vice President Kamala Harris? In the United States there may have been many Republicans who believed in it, but in Germany and Europe there were hardly anyone.
The outcome of this election is enormously important for Germany. In the past few weeks, the panic of a Trump return had slowly grown in the Federal Republic – and with it the realization that German politicians were poorly prepared for this. On the contrary: the principle of hope reigned that the Trump storm would pass again – and Germany would be spared.
There are anecdotes in political Berlin these days that people are telling each other more often with a view to the upcoming US election. One of them deals with a dinner between then US President Barack Obama and Angela Merkel in November 2016. Trump had just won the US presidential election against Hillary Clinton, and Obama came back to Berlin to have dinner with the then Chancellor in the chic Hotel Adlon .
Trump’s election is also said to have motivated Merkel to run again in the federal election in 2017. At least that’s what Obama confidant Ben Rhodes writes in his book “The World as It Is.” It’s about Obama’s years in the White House and the shock that Trump’s election caused internationally. According to Rhodes, Merkel wanted to be re-elected in office to defend the liberal international order. When the then Chancellor and Obama last saw each other in office in Berlin, Merkel is said to have had a single tear in her eye. Obama is said to have said to his confidant: “She’s all alone.”
Without a doubt, Merkel and Obama got along extremely well, a friendship that continues to this day. And in fact, Merkel found herself in this role of protecting the Western alliance from Trump, above all keeping the European states together politically and responding with demonstrative calm to Trump’s attacks on multilateralism.
It wasn’t easy: According to CNN, Trump insulted the Chancellor as “stupid” because of Germany’s relations with Russia and, according to Trump’s former security adviser, John Bolton, then-President Merkel squeezed a cough drop with the words into her mouth at the G7 summit in Canada in 2018 Hand: “Here, Angela. Don’t say I won’t give you anything again.”
