Relationships with the USA: Merz wants to go to the Palatinate with Trump

Chancellor Friedrich Merz (CDU) wants to visit the home town of his ancestors in the Palatinate with Donald Trump if the US President will follow his invitation to Germany. “I invited him to come to Germany, visit us in his hometown of Bad Dürkheim. And I will go there with him,” announced Merz at the CDU business day in Berlin.

Last week, the Chancellor had only called Trump for 30 minutes after taking office and invited him to Germany for 30 minutes.

Trump’s ancestors come from the small vintage site of Kallstadt on the Weinstrasse in Rhineland-Palatinate, which belongs to the district of Bad Dürkheim. Trump’s grandparents emigrated to New York from there at the end of the 19th century. Merz knows the area because he completed his military service in the Palatinate in the 1970s.

Visit to Washington “soon”

The Chancellor also confirmed that he would “visit Trump in Washington shortly”. He would talk to the US President about topics “that have held us together for decades” like NATO, but also about current challenges such as the termination of the Ukraine War.

In this context, he referred to his second conversation with Trump on Saturday, when he talked to him from Kiev together with the French President Emmanuel Macron, the British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and the Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk. It showed itself there: “We are together in the European Union, we want to keep the Americans on board and we now show that the free world we are, (…) We are determined to defend ourselves,” he said.