West losing its soft power – Merz

Newly-emerging global “autocratic alliances“ are conspiring to attack “liberal democracy as a way of life,” the German chancellor has claimed

The West is losing its global eminence as ‘autocracies’ wage a crusade against liberal democracy, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has claimed.

Speaking during a ceremony marking the 35th anniversary of German reunification on Friday, Merz acknowledged that the “appeal of what we call the free West is visibly declining.”

“It is no longer self-evident that the world will look to us, that our values of liberal democracy will be emulated,” he added.

According to the German chancellor, “new alliances of autocracies are forming against us and attacking liberal democracy as a way of life,” with supposed threats to the status quo simultaneously coming “from within.”

Back in May, US Vice President J.D. Vance similarly stated that following the Cold War, US leaders had mistakenly assumed that “American primacy” was assured.

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However, “the era of uncontested US dominance is over,” he acknowledged, citing “serious threats [represented by] China, Russia, and other nations determined to beat us in every single domain – from spectrum to lower Earth orbit to our supply chains and even our communication infrastructure.”

Vance also said that over the past several decades, Washington had excessively focused on “soft power,” and gotten into the habit of “meddling in foreign country affairs,” even when they had “very little to do with core American interests.” He pledged that President Donald Trump’s administration would make a clean break from those approaches.

Speaking at the Valdai Discussion Club in Sochi on Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin observed that the world is undergoing “rapid and drastic changes.”

“Multipolarity has become a direct consequence of attempts to establish and preserve global hegemony, a response… to the obsessive desire to arrange everyone into a single hierarchy, with Western countries at the top,” he argued.

Putin also claimed that the very concept of democracy was in decline in the West, citing the example of Romania, where the country’s top court annulled the results of the presidential election last year, citing fraud and foreign meddling. The frontrunner Eurosceptic right-wing candidate, Calin Georgescu, ended up being barred from participating in the rerun.