BERLIN: The leaders of France and Germany warned of the dangers to democracy within their countries and from hostile foreign powers as they marked 35 years of German unification on Friday.
French President Emmanuel Macron was invited to take part in a ceremony marking the anniversary in the southwestern German city of Saarbruecken, where he described the threat of “a degeneration of our democracies” in a wide-ranging speech.
At the same event, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said that “new alliances of autocracies are forming against us” and that “our liberal way of life is under attack, from both outside and within.”
FASTFACT
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said that ‘new alliances of autocracies are forming against us’ and that ‘our liberal way of life is under attack, from both outside and within.’
He said that European countries “must relearn how to defend ourselves” by “deterring our adversaries from further aggression.”
Germany has been the second-biggest supplier of aid to Ukraine since Russia’s offensive began in February 2022 and is on high alert for sabotage and other acts of “hybrid warfare” directed from Moscow.
Merz has made it an aim of his government to build up Europe’s “strongest conventional army” in response to the Russian threat as well as concerns about US security commitments to Europe under President Donald Trump.
Macron also stressed the importance of Europe becoming “for the first time, a military power” and avoiding the fate of being “happy or unhappy vassals, depending on the choices of those we rely on.”
He also aimed at social media giants “controlled either by major American entrepreneurs or large Chinese companies.”
He accused them of allowing “a democratic public space to emerge where people are all masked, anonymous, where the rule is to insult others if one wants to be popular.”
Merz said: “The global economic order is being rewritten. Customs barriers are being erected and selfishness is growing,” he said. “This too is weakening us economically.”
The French head of state called on Europeans to mount a “resurgence” to “rebuild a 21st-century democracy.”
Otherwise, Europe would risk becoming “a continent, like many others, of conspiracy theorists, extremes, noise, and fury.”
France and Germany have both seen a rise in the popularity of political parties on the far right and far left in recent years, at the expense of the centrist blocs that had previously predominated.
Merz took office in February after a campaign marked by at times emotional rhetoric from both him and his opponents on migration, at a time when Germany’s export-dependent high-tech economy faces its biggest challenge in decades.
“Years of irregular, undirected migration to Germany have polarized our country and dug new divisions into our society,” Merz said on Friday, while asking fellow citizens to recognize the value of living in a democracy governed by the rule of law.
“Politics, the state, the government have their responsibility,” he said.
“But the scale of the challenge must be understood by us all, by every citizen in our country.”
