Can this guy really save Europe from Elon Musk?

Ten or 15 years ago, Friedrich Merz would have seemed a wildly unlikely candidate for the role of savior to Europe’s liberal democracy. If we flash back to the bygone days of the late 2000s, Merz’s future looked to be in the past: He was Angela Merkel's defeated right-wing rival in the Christian Democratic Union, the mainstream conservative party that has dominated German electoral politics since the fall of the Nazi regime, first in the former West Germany and then, less convincingly, in post-1990 reunified Germany. After “winning” Germany’s recent federal elections, in what may be remembered as a textbook example of Pyrrhic victory — the CDU finished first with 28.5 percent of the vote, slightly better than its worst-ever result in 2021 — Merz will now be forced to preside over an awkward coalition of center-right and center-left parties, whose primary purpose will be to fend off further advances by the not-quite neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany party, or AfD. On one hand, Merz is something of a black box, an untested leader who has never held a position in government and whose entire career seems mismatched to this perilous fork in history’s road. Merz has described the attempts by Musk and various other Yank interlopers to meddle in Germany’s elections as “no less dramatic and drastic and ultimately outrageous than the interventions we have seen from Moscow,” and suggested that under Trump the U.S. appeared “largely indifferent to the fate of Europe.” This marks a startling reversal for the man described by German journalist Jörg Lau as the most pro-American politician in Germany and “a lifelong believer in the transatlantic security alliance”.