TIRANA – Some 76 percent of Germans think US-EU relations would improve if opposition candidate Joe Biden beat incumbent Donald Trump in upcoming American elections, according to a survey by pollster Forza for the Internationale Politik journal in Germany.
Several recent polls showed similar results, with the Pew Research Center, another pollster saying in January that just 13 percent of Germans thought Trump was doing a good job in the White House, according to EUobserver on Monday.
“If Biden wins, everybody’s going to cheer and say everything’s wonderful,” said John C. Kornblum, U.S. ambassador to Germany under President Bill Clinton. “But compared with 2016, he will be dealing with an entirely different world of issues and problems — and they aren’t going to be solved just by him being nice,” he has recently been quoted as telling NBC News.
Nevertheless, the U.S. election presents two drastically different visions of German’s future.
Trump is about as unpopular there as anywhere on the planet. Many fear that if he is re-elected, he would not only trash what’s left of Berlin’s ties with Washington but deal a death blow to the concept of the West itself.
“This is the most important U.S. election in the history of Germany,” said John M. Koenig, who led the Berlin embassy as chargé d’affaires for a year under President Barack Obama. “This means almost as much to the future of Germany as it does to the U.S.” /argumentum.al
