51�Թ�

Merz, whose CDU party won Germany's general election last month, proposed the measures swiftly after the win.

He returned to the CDU in 2018 as the anti-Merkel, vowing to spice up the party’s usual agenda of pro-business fiscal “austerity” and free trade with staunchly pro-American foreign policy and a dash of hard-right anti-immigration policy.

That may also reflect a sense of injured pride and betrayal: Clear back to Konrad Adenauer in the 1950s, the CDU has always presented itself as a staunch American ally, largely aligned with what we’d now have to call the vanished orthodoxy of the pre-Trump Republican Party.

He ran as an overtly MAGA-curious candidate during his failed campaign for CDU leadership in 2018, and only weeks ago pushed a harsh non-binding resolution on migrant policy through the Bundestag with the AfD’s support.

And even though the voices in the CDU are getting louder to open up and burn down the “firewall” against working with this party, the CDU vows publicly not to do it.