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Can this guy really save Europe from Elon Musk?

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Reviews Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary? Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting

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Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary?

Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous

Is College Necessary?

Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear

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Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

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SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters

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Can this guy really save Europe from Elon Musk?

Well, of course not. But Germany's accidental chancellor has a crucial role to play in history, like it or not

Published March 2, 2025 6:00AM (EST)

Ten or 15 years ago, Friedrich Merz would have seemed a wildly unlikely candidate for the role of savior to Europe’s liberal democracy. Spoiler alert: He still does. 

But the internal decay of European politics has reached a critical stage, whose stakes were made abundantly clear by the ludicrous spectacle of Donald Trump and JD Vance berating Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office for insufficiently groveling before the Orange Throne. This was not the historical moment Merz expected, and it definitely isn’t the one he wanted. But for better or worse, he looks to be Europe’s last man standing.

If we flash back to the bygone days of the late 2000s, Merz’s future looked to be in the past: He was Angela Merkel’s defeated right-wing rival in the Christian Democratic Union, the mainstream conservative party that has dominated German electoral politics since the fall of the Nazi regime, first in the former West Germany and then, less convincingly, in post-1990 reunified........

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