Chancellor Friedrich Merz has cancelled his planned trip to the UN General Assembly in New York next week because his presence is required in Berlin, dpa has learned from government circles.<\/p>\n
The chancellor’s speech during the general debate of the UN General Assembly was scheduled by the United Nations for late Wednesday afternoon – three days after the state elections in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Berlin. These two elections are seen as crucial to the chancellor’s political future.<\/p>\n
On Monday, his conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party’s top leadership bodies will meet, and on Tuesday, the CDU\/CSU parliamentary group in the Bundestag.<\/p>\n
Merz is under tremendous pressure following the disastrous election results for the CDU in the September 6 election in the east German state of Saxony-Anhalt, where the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) nearly won an outright majority.<\/p>\n
Key elections loom on Sunday<\/p>\n
The chancellor’s party is facing two tough elections this Sunday, when voters in the east German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and the city-state of Berlin go to the polls.<\/p>\n
Projections show his CDU at an historic low in the east German state, while the party, which leads the current city-state coalition in Berlin, is neck-and-neck with the far-left party The Left. The AfD is running a close third in the capital city, Germany’s largest.<\/p>\n
Added to his woes are the exceptionally high petrol prices which are hurting the country’s many motorists and differences with his junior coalition partner, the Social Democrats, over how to help the country’s growing number of financially strapped drivers.<\/p>\n
Merz also didn’t go last year<\/p>\n
The general debate of the UN General Assembly takes place every year in September. Merz also chose not to attend last year. Instead, Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul spoke on behalf of Germany.<\/p>\n
This is likely to be the case again this year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Chancellor Friedrich Merz has cancelled his planned trip to the UN General Assembly in New York next week…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":347599,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[130037,63517,130038,9,11,10,113799],"class_list":["post-347598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-christian-democratic-union","tag-friedrich-merz","tag-mecklenburg-vorpommern","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-un-general-assembly"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347598","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=347598"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347598\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/347599"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=347598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=347598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=347598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}