Germany: Merz calls for European ‘independence’ from US after Conservatives win election – Europe live

Hello and welcome to our live coverage of the German election results. CDU leader Friedrich Merz has said his “absolute priority” will be to strengthen Europe so as to achieve independence from the US in defence matters as he prepares to embark on coalition negotiations that are expected to last until Easter.

Speaking on Sunday evening Merz said US President Donald Trump had made it “clear that [his] government is fairly indifferent to Europe’s fate” and that Germany would have to wait to see “whether we will still be able to speak about Nato in its current form” when the alliance meets for its next summit in June.

“For me, the absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA” in defence matters, Merz said. His centre-right CDU/CSU alliance came top of the German election, winning 28.5% of the vote, while outgoing Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD) crashed to its worst result since the second world war, gaining just 16.4% of the vote. The two would have just enough seats to form a so-called grand coalition and this is considered the most likely option for Merz.

The far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party was meanwhile celebrating its best result ever, having secured second place on 20.8%. The party’s chancellor candidate and co-leader, Alice Weidel, called it a “historic success for us – our best result ever.”.

“We extend our hand to offer cooperation with the CDU. Otherwise change won’t be possible in Germany,” she added. All mainstream parties have ruled out a coalition with the AfD however, due to the country’s firewall, or taboo, barring cooperation with the far-right.

Here’s a roundup of the latest developments:. The Greens, the SPD’s coalition partner, slumped by three percentage points to 11.6%. The Left has surged to 8.8% and the liberal FDP – which triggered the early election by collapsing Olaf Scholz’s coalition – along with the far-left Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance failed to meet the 5% threshold required top get into parliament.

The results mean Merz could form a so-called “grand coalition” with the SPD, without needing to find a third party. That would mean a future government would be more stable and less fractious than for example Scholz’s. The Social Democratic party was left reeling on the back of a historically low vote share, with outgoing chancellor, Olaf Scholz, admitting it was a “bitter result”. He said he would not be involved in any coalition talks with the CDU/CSU, with other SPD leaders expected to lead negotiations.

Merz hailed “a historic election evening,” and acknowledged the responsibility and the scale of the task ahead. He said he planned to form a coalition by Easter and told party faithful that “the world out there is not waiting for us and for lengthy negotiations.”.

Alice Weidel, co-leader of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) called the result “historic” for her party, having doubled the number of votes from 2021. Weidel said her party remained open to coalition talks with other parties, and said excluding the AfD was the equivalent to “voter fraud”.

The AfD swept all five former East German states: Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Brandenburg, Saxony-Anhalt, Saxony and Thuringia. It won well over 30% of the vote in each state and as much as 38.6% in Thuringia – that’s where the AfD made history in September as the first far-right party to win a state election since the second world war.

Christian Lindner, the leader of the liberal FDP whose falling out with Scholz triggered the collapse of his coalition government and paved the way for early elections, resigned after his party failed to reach the 5% threshold to re-enter parliament. In a post on X, he said would retire from active politics and said he hoped the election would bring a “new start for Germany”.

Guten Morgen aus Berlin,. In November 2019, Freidrich Merz joined a conference of German students at Harvard. Freshly returned to politics after a decade in business, but not even a CDU/CSU leader at the time yet as he lost the bid to succeed Angela Merkel to Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, he spoke at length about his affinity with the US, which he had been “travelling to for 40 years now,” with “more than 150 visits.”.

Long seen as one of the most pro-American politicians in Germany, the former executive of US investment company BlackRock admitted that under the first Trump presidency, Europe had “some strong debates with this US government and this US president” in particular.

But he urged the students to “fight for our open society and what Europe and America have in common ... to fight for freedom, ... for open speech, of religion, of the press, of our societies entirely.”. At the end of the speech, he promised, as people casually do at these sort of conferences, that he would be back to Harvard ten years later to give an update on how things are going.