9.9.2026
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s planned phone call with US President Donald Trump has been cancelled, a German government spokesman said Wednesday, without giving a reason.
“The chancellor’s schedule had included a telephone call with President Trump for today; however, the German side has postponed this call,” government spokesman Stefan Kornelius told a press conference in Berlin.
“A new date has not yet been set,” he said, declining to comment on the reason.
Trump writing on his Truth Social platform praised the victory of far right party Alternative for Germany (AfD), that won a state election in Saxony-Anhalt.
“Wow! The Populist Party in Germany just had a really big night,” he wrote.
“They finally got tired of the absolutely horrible Immigration rules and regulations which have hurt Germany so badly. THEY ARE ON THE RISE, and not going to take it anymore! MGGA!!!” he added, using an abbreviation for “Make Germany Great Again.”
Meanwhile the AfD has called for the deportation of more than one million refugees whose asylum claims have been rejected, doubling down on its demands just days after its regional election victory.
In a heated debate in the German parliament, AfD co-leader Alice Weidel said that voters had backed a radical shift to curb mass immigration by delivering a landslide win for her party in Sunday’s election.
“You declare the migration crisis over. Yet every year hundreds of thousands of migrants enter the country through the asylum back door, most from Muslim tribal cultures,” she said.
Chancellor Friedrich Merz, speaking after Weidel, rejected her account as detached from reality and stressed the contribution of migrants to the German economy. Millions of people with a migrant background work in the skilled crafts, he said, and every sixth employee in that sector holds a foreign passport.
“If those migrants who work in Germany have to leave the country because of your ‘remigration’ plans, then the skilled-trades sector in Germany can no longer function,” Merz said. “Then not a single care home will work anymore, then not a single hospital in Germany will work anymore, then not a single restaurant will be able to run in Germany.”
He accused the AfD of stoking fear and dividing society. “What you are propagating here, namely remigration, is nothing other than ethnic cleansing by skin color and origin — nothing else,” he said. AA