BERLIN — German Chancellor Friedrich Merz on Wednesday pushed back against a new, million-dollar funding scheme from U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration to support “free speech and religious liberty” in Europe.
The funding comes against the backdrop of the U.S.’s efforts to support nationalist parties in Europe as part of its National Security Strategy and burgeoning links between the Trump administration and Europe’s far right, including the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.
“We do not interfere in American elections; we’ve always stuck to that,” Merz said in Berlin in response to a reporter’s question on whether he deemed the initiative to be valid advocacy or political interference. “Conversely, I don’t want the American government or government-affiliated institutions to interfere in German elections,” he added.
The U.S. State Department on Monday launched a funding scheme worth nearly $5 million “to strengthen and develop democratic resilience, rule of law, freedom of speech and freedom of the press, and the defense of human rights in Europe.” Beneficiaries should “address national sovereignty, migration, censorship, and lawfare challenges in line with shared political philosophy, law, and our common Western civilizational heritage,” the statement reads.
The Financial Times was first to report the scheme, which could grant individual applicants up to $3 million.
Although the call does not explicitly list political parties as potential beneficiaries, Merz pointed to the illegality of foreign monetary support for political actors in Germany.
“It is illegal to finance political parties in Germany from abroad,” said the conservative leader. “And I assume that our friends around the world, in particular, will also abide by these legal rules that we have established in Germany,” he added.
The U.S. State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Merz’s remarks or whether the program could support civil society organizations linked to far-right parties in Europe, such as the AfD.
Senior U.S. State Department officials have previously denied interfering in European politics despite holding meetings with politicians from Europe’s far right, including the AfD.
The AfD is polling first nationally and has a realistic chance of coming to power for the first time at the regional level in the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt in September.
Early in Trump’s second term, the far-right party eagerly embraced endorsements from Elon Musk, the tech entrepreneur and Trump supporter, and celebrated Vice President JD Vance’s attack on European firewalls against the far right at last year’s Munich Security Conference.
But the party’s leadership has distanced itself — at least publicly — from MAGA in past months because of what they see as the urgent political realities in the far-right strongholds of the former East Germany ahead of the state elections in the region in September.
More broadly, the new funding scheme appears to specifically target efforts by the European Union to regulate U.S. big tech.
“Supra-national institutions and governments are using state power to undermine fundamental principles of democratic self-government through overbroad and vague hate-speech laws and online content regulations that police and punish speech while suppressing political participation,” the funding call reads.
