Germany’s Merz ventures into Trump’s lion’s den – POLITICO

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz needs to be prepared for an ambush of the kind endured by the leaders of Ukraine and South Africa when he meets U.S. President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on Thursday.

Trump’s hostility to “bad, very bad” Germans is notorious, and Merz is bound to face sharp questions in the harsh glare of TV cameras about his election night remarks in February that Europe needs to “achieve independence from the USA” and that Trump’s administration is “largely indifferent to the fate of Europe.”

Merz will equally need to elude tripwires on an array of topics: German car exports, support for NATO and Ukraine, and — perhaps most awkwardly — the Trump administration’s sympathy for the far-right, anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) opposition party, the country’s second-strongest political force.