Nette Nöstlinger

1 month ago | politico.eu | Chris Lunday |Nette Nöstlinger

BERLIN — Germany’s Greens are vowing to put an end to Friedrich Merz’s paradigm-changing plan to invest massively in defense and infrastructure. Greens leaders on Monday said they would urge lawmakers in the party to reject a historic deal by Merz’s conservatives and the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) to unleash hundreds of billions of euros of new spending to bolster the military and invest heavily in the economy.

1 month ago | politico.eu | Nette Nöstlinger |Johanna Treeck |Chris Lunday

BERLIN — Chancellor-in-waiting Friedrich Merz is promising a constitutional revolution to allow Germany to become Europe’s unlikely big spender — on arms and infrastructure — to contend with a new world order in which America is no longer a dependable ally.

1 month ago | politico.eu | Nette Nöstlinger |Emily Schultheis

BERLIN — The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has never had a bigger stage. The party is set to become the largest opposition force in Germany’s Bundestag after securing its best outcome yet in a national election, taking second place behind the conservative winners in the Feb. 23 ballot and almost doubling its parliamentary seat total. That position provides the party with material benefits and also its greatest platform yet from which to attack the next coalition government.

1 month ago | politico.eu | Nette Nöstlinger |Chris Lunday

Germany’s conservative victors in Sunday’s election are considering circumventing strict spending rules in order to adopt a potentially massive defense package as alarm grows that the United States will no longer protect Europe within NATO. That move could come within weeks. Workarounds to Germany’s constitutional spending restraints require a two-thirds majority in parliament, which could allow two parties that finished strongly in the Feb.

1 month ago | politico.eu | Nette Nöstlinger |Emily Schultheis

It was late at night, exactly one month before the Feb. 23 election, that Friedrich Merz confided to a group of party insiders that he had come to a historic decision. The country was reeling from a horrific attack a day earlier, when an Afghan asylum-seeker wandered into a park in the wealthy southern state of Bavaria and used a kitchen knife to stab to death a 2-year-old boy and a man looking after him.