Friedrich Merz ‘knowledge of English: “This is a performance”

He came to the White House without an interpreter – and he wouldn’t have had it at all. Friedrich Merz talked to US President Donald Trump and the US press in perfect English on Thursday in the Oval Office (if he had their say).

The host was impressed by the Chancellor’s language skills. “You speak so good English,” praised Trump, who has been with the Chancellor since a phone call. “Is that as good as your German?” Merz wished: “No, that’s not my mother tongue.”

Nevertheless: Merz ‘inaugural visit to Washington, D.C., should also have registered for the first time that the new Chancellor can convince with his English skills – something that is not necessarily remembered by Angela Merkel or Olaf Scholz. “For someone like Trump, who is important to the personal meeting, this is of enormous advantage,” said Rob Schmitz, the Central European Exhibition of the US radio station NPR. “Seems superficial, but it is not because the Chancellor is able to quickly defuse critical situations himself. Trump is obviously not a person who has patience for translators, he wants to speak directly.”

It also explains that the Chancellor apparently dominates negotiating English. According to his own information, he stayed at school once and took off his Abitur with a “weak three”, but at the latest from moving into the European Parliament in 1989, Merz was also at home on an international parquet – English is something like an unofficial official language in Brussels and Strasbourg. The English language was also one of his work tools as a later partner and senior citizen of the international law firm Mayer Brown LLP – this is now useful to him as a Chancellor. In addition, there is Merz ‘ambition: “I try to understand almost everything and speak as well as possible,” he said in the Oval Office about Donald Trump – and thus underlined his will for communication, in two ways.

The Chancellor’s knowledge of English only remained to say: “This is a performance.”