Person
German politician and chancellor since 2025, leader of the center-right CDU party.
EU leaders asked the Commission on Oct. 15 to draft a tool that could block Chinese goods from the bloc entirely by year-end, Bloomberg reported. The sector safeguards for chemicals, machinery and wind turbines are still at the statistics stage.
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EU leaders have asked the Commission for new trade instruments as the China deficit, €360 billion last year, is set to be larger this year. We expect more trade defense, but its form is unsettled while leaders contest a 2028 to 2034 budget.
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Germany plans a state-backed cooperation deal with Nvidia, to be announced next week with funding in the hundreds of millions of euros. At a 200 million euro floor that is ten times the 20 million the economy ministry gave Soofi, the project it builds on.
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Draft summit conclusions ask the Commission to add trade instruments against China after a €360 billion goods deficit in 2025. Industry groups blame the imports for closures, but the only jobs figure Reuters reports is an unnamed diplomat's "thousands" a month.
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Ireland, holding the EU presidency, proposed a 1.62 trillion euro ($1.81 trillion) budget for 2028-2034, 30% above the current package. Sweden calls it unaffordable and Germany says a deal is a long way off.
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Brussels is weighing a volume cap on Chinese plug-in hybrids, Bloomberg reported, as the EU's trade deficit with China runs near a billion euros a day. Leaders meeting October 15 and 16 can keep going product by product or back the country-level 'kill switch' Merz and Macron want.
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Maroš Šefčovič heads to China seeking a one-sector pilot deal, expected to cover cars, to curb hybrid exports that boomed after the EU's 2024 EV tariffs. For European carmakers and suppliers, the talks test whether a sector-wide limit can hold where a tariff on one powertrain let exports move to another.
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Friedrich Merz took 10 defense and energy executives to Kyiv as Berlin prepared to unveil about 1bn euros in military aid and 350m euros for energy repair. How much of that money turns into orders for German or other European suppliers depends on terms that have not yet been published.
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Friedrich Merz will meet Klaas Knot and Pablo Hernandez de Cos, the two frontrunners to succeed Christine Lagarde, as three ECB posts fall vacant. People familiar said Berlin has dropped Joachim Nagel and is weighing the chief economist and markets seats instead.
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The party's plurality came in a state of barely two million people, too small for any firm to plan against on its own. The federal coalition's response is what firms can actually plan against, and two more state votes are days away.
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A joint declaration signed on 10 September puts about 1 GW of new data centres inside a EUR 40bn Emirati pledge to Germany, with no builder, location or timeline given for any of it. The signed company agreements in the same document total EUR 9.356bn.
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About €20bn and 51 deals were announced at the Paris space summit, on top of an ESA budget member states had already approved. The dates suppliers will be judged against came from Macron's address, not from a contract.
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The one-year exemption dies only for coins bought after the law starts. Berlin's own first-year forecast is 160 million euros. The clear winners are the traders currently paying up to 42 per cent.
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The far right's landslide in Saxony-Anhalt leaves the mainstream parties a majority they can only build with the Left Party, which the CDU also refuses to touch, so the firewall's margin now depends on wasted votes.
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Internal German notes reported by Politico Europe treat France's Arcadia as a fresh dependency, yet accept that Berlin will share data with it so a later German platform can sit alongside. That concession is the real decision.
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Isar's Spectrum gives Europe a launch path that does not run through French Guiana or the United States. At about one tonne of payload and one success in two attempts, it is a supplier to qualify rather than a slot to book.
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Germany now imports more from China than it exports in the very categories it used to own. Its incumbents are answering with cheaper goods made in China, while 71,000 job reductions sit on the books.
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The September roadmap Berlin and Paris ordered in July leans on a 25 to 30% yuan revaluation, which works out to roughly €13bn of deficit closure per percentage point, and which the People's Bank of China alone can grant.
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Defence ministry documents seen by POLITICO put a number and a delivery schedule behind Berlin's deep-strike ambitions. The Bundestag has approved none of it yet.
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The order to "substantially reduce" US-South Korea exercises came with no meeting scheduled and no public reply from Pyongyang. That makes it a planning input, not a headline.
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