When Will Friedrich Merz Get the Orange Toupee? – Germany in the Shadow of a Republican Dream

A country that intends to cut its development aid by one billion euros, with the parliamentary decision scheduled for July 9, that relativizes human rights and deports critically ill individuals without wheelchairs – what remains of it, other than an echo of authoritarian ideologies that once began in Washington and now resonate more quietly, but no less destructively, in the Bundestag? The question is no longer whether Friedrich Merz is following in Donald Trump's footsteps, but only when he will be handed the appropriate orange toupee. The political drift has long since taken place. The transformation does not come with noise, but with budget annotations, administrative files, and police doorbells in the middle of the night. German development aid is set to face drastic cuts. SPD and CDU approved a budget concept that could have come straight from a Trumpian playbook. The Global South? A burden. Democracy promotion? No longer profitable. Addressing the root causes of flight? Only if it serves the deportation statistics. The new course is brutally honest: “Why should we pay for the world’s problems?” – that’s how Donald Trump once put it. Now, in Berlin, the message is: aid only if it “pays off” for Germany. And that is no longer foreign policy. It is location-based ideology with barbed-wire thinking. But development aid is just the beginning. The German debates on migration policy now read like a poorly translated version of American hardliner scripts: transit zones, third-country solutions, visa bans. Pushbacks as a necessity, not a taboo. Interior ministers who want to replace integration with coercion. Olaf Scholz, (In this case, I actually mean Scholz, not Klingbeil, because of his past as Chancellor), goes along with it, quietly. Merz, on the other hand, speaks plainly: “We need to eliminate the pull factors.” What he means is: the rule of law. The right to asylum. Human dignity. Everything that still carries a bit of hope.

And hope? Hope is leaving Germany right now in transport planes. Or in police vans at three o'clock in the morning. It is children being deported – without notice, without a wheelchair, without medical care. It is families who were told: "Integrate," and then torn out of everyday school life. In Brigachtal, for example, a 19-year-old boy with muscular dystrophy was taken away into the darkness – even though he had therapies, even though he went to school. The state came in the night. And they call that administrative enforcement. Anyone who thinks that at least the institutions, education, schools will be strengthened – is mistaken. Public infrastructure is crumbling, classrooms are overcrowded. School social work is being slashed, language support cut, all-day programs abolished. It is a withdrawal in slow motion. The GEW (teachers’ union) speaks of a "silent state of emergency." It is the noise of indifference that drowns it out. When the state retreats from education, space opens up for ideology. Or as the CDU calls it: "An end to gender ideology." The rainbow flag, once a quiet promise of visibility, becomes a target. In Bavaria, Hesse, and Saxony-Anhalt, its presence on public buildings is being fought. At the Federal Ministry of the Interior, it is being quietly rolled up – officially to "maintain neutrality." In fact, this marked a retreat, a capitulation in the face of the conservative culture war. And it is precisely that culture war that Trump has been waging for years against "wokeness," "drag shows," and "leftist universities." Only that it has now arrived in ministries here.

The retreat is not only cultural, it is geopolitical: Germany's share in global vaccine distribution is declining. UN projects are no longer being funded. Sea rescue? Delegitimized. NGOs? Under suspicion. Aid organizations are being put under pressure to justify themselves – whether they might be "promoting migration." What Trump called "globalist NGOs" are called "leftist helpers" here. The language is different. The suspicion is the same. And when Friedrich Merz says that "performance" must come to the fore again, it is not just campaign rhetoric. It is an ideological euphemism for usefulness. Those who are "useful" – stay. Those who are not – go. That is authoritarian economics. That is not democratic. And it is precisely the kind of selection that Trump once justified with the sentence: "They're not sending their best." What is happening here is not classic Trumpism. It is a creeping takeover of Republican thought patterns – detached from personalities, but infused with the same values: isolation instead of cooperation. Coercion instead of partnership. Distrust instead of empathy. And when SPD politicians go along with it, it is no longer political center. It is political mimicry. Friedrich Merz doesn't need to put on a toupee. He already carries Trump's program in his heart. Only the makeup of reason is German. The rest is American export goods – made in Mar-a-Lago, delivered to Berlin.