German Chancellor Angela Merkel is stepping down from her post. After the German Green Party announced last week that it had nominated Annalena Baerbock as its candidate for chancellor, the party surpassed Merkel’s coalition party in the top spot in opinion polls.
Baerbock, a mother of two, is considered a centrist who supports a green economy and a tougher foreign policy stance on Communist China and Russia, and her candidacy has been widely welcomed.
Bell Burke told Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung that Europe should use its economic power to stop Chinese goods that are manufactured using forced labor and avoid using Chinese Communist Party communications technology that endangers European security.
“We are currently in a competition between different regimes: authoritarian regimes versus liberal democracies.” Bell Burke said in an interview published on Sunday (25).
Belbeck described the Communist Party’s investment in infrastructure and energy networks from Central Asia to Europe as “brutal power politics.
“We Europeans must not deceive ourselves,” Belbeck added, adding that the EU needs to act to defend its values, for example by using the recent investment agreement between the EU and the Chinese Communist Party to raise more forcefully the issue of forced labor of the Uighur minority by the Communist Party.
The Green Party’s popularity surged after the announcement of Bell Burke as the nominee, receiving 2,159 applications to join the party in one week, about 10 times the usual number. The Greens now have 107,300 members.
A poll of 1,225 voters commissioned by German newspaper Bild am Sonntag and conducted by polling firm Kantar after the announcement of the chancellor’s nominee showed the Greens with 28 percent support, an increase of 6 percentage points and the highest ever for the party in Kantar’s weekly survey.
Support for Merkel’s center-right CDU (Christian Democratic Union)/CSU (Christian Social Union) coalition fell 2 percentage points to 27 percent. Merkel’s junior coalition partner, the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), lost 2 percentage points to 13%, its lowest point in the Kantar poll since August 2019.
The far-right Alternative for Germany party gained 10%, the pro-business Free Democrats 9% and the left-wing party 7%.
Germans will elect a new parliament on Sept. 26 and then choose who will become the country’s next chancellor.
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