Germany’s Likely Next Chancellor Friedrich Merz Invites Netanyahu to Berlin, Shuns ICC ‘Arrest Warrant’
CDU chancellor candidate Merz: “Under my leadership, the Israeli prime minister will be able to travel to Germany unimpeded.”
Germany’s likely next Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, on Monday invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on an official visit to the country, rejecting a sham arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court (ICC).
The invitation comes a day after Friedrich Merz’s conservative Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) won Sunday’s general election by getting the most share of votes, ahead of the main rival Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.
“I told [Netanyahu] that we should see each other soon after the government is formed,” Merz said Monday. “In the event that he plans to visit Germany, I have committed myself to find a way to ensure that he can visit Germany and leave again without being arrested,” he assured, rejecting the kangaroo court’s warrant.
Merz’s comments are in sharp contrast to the stance taken by the outgoing Social Democrat-led government. In May 2024, Chancellor Olaf “Scholz spokesman indicate[d] Germany would arrest Netanyahu,” the Germany newspaper BILD reported.
Merz, then leader of the opposition in the parliament, slammed Chancellor Scholz’s government for submitting to the dictates of the Hague-based ‘international’ court. “The silence of the German government, right up to the suggestion by the government spokesman that Netanyahu could be arrested on German soil, is now really becoming a scandal,” he reacted.
In May 2024, ICC prosecutor Karim Khan sought arrest warrants for Prime Minister Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. The self-appointed court in November 2024 issued those warrants for the two Israeli leaders for overseeing a military operation to liberate 24o Israeli hostages from the clutches of Gaza-based terror group Hamas after the October 7 massacre.
The U.S. and Israel do not recognize the jurisdiction of the Europe-based court, which in the past has organized witch hunts to prosecute American and Israeli servicemen. Germany is a signatory to the ‘Treaty of Rome’ that led to the creation of the court.
Germany state-owned DW TV reported Merz’s remarks Monday:
Conservative leader and election winner Friedrich Merz reportedly intends to invite Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for an official visit to Germany, despite the arrest warrant against the Israeli leader.
Netanyahu’s office said that he had a “warm conversation” with Germany’s likely future chancellor on Sunday evening and congratulated him on his success, and that Merz handed Netanyahu an official invitation to Germany as an “in overt defiance of the scandalous International Criminal Court decision to label the Prime Minister a war criminal.”
A spokesperson for Merz’s conservative CDU party confirmed to news agencies Reuters and DPA that the two had spoken by phone after the election. However, they declined to comment on the substance of the conversation.
Two weeks ago, Merz told German-Jewish newspaper Jüdische Allgemeine that he would invite Netanyahu as soon as he wins the election.
“Under my leadership, the Israeli prime minister will be able to travel to Germany unimpeded,” he said.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had a warm conversation last night with Friedrich Merz, who following his victory in the German elections, has become Chancellor-designate, and congratulated him on his victory.
— Prime Minister of Israel (@IsraeliPM) February 24, 2025
‘Chancellor-elect’ Merz apparently made those comments after a phone call with Prime Minister Netanyahu following his election victory. The Times of Israel published an excerpt from the readout:
Netanyahu’s office said he had congratulated Merz and that the German election winner had invited the premier to visit.
“Merz thanked the prime minister for his call and said he would invite him for an official visit to Germany, openly defying the ICC’s scandalous decision to label the prime minister as a war criminal,” said the Prime Minister’s Office.
Merz, a long-time rival of former Chancellor Angela Merkel, left politics in 2009 after losing the leadership battle to her. Only after Merkel retired from public office in 2018 did Merz return to active politics. During the 2025 election campaign, Merz promised to end the uncontrolled mass-migration which began under Merkel’s watch in 2015.
Merz is expected to form the country’s next government by forging a coalition with Social Democrats (SPD). His preferred junior partner, Free Democrats (FDP), failed to clear the 5 percent hurdle needed to get seats in the Bundestag. Merz’s CDU has ruled out a coalition government with the AfD, a move shunned by all mainstream parties under the concept of so-called Brandmauer, or firewall, against the ‘right-wing’ party.
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Comments
Merz needs a cool new slogan. Maybe “Make Germany Great Again”
Will he do what needs to be done to fix Germany’s greatest threat?
With regard to the issue of AfD being in or out of the new government, I’m reminded of camels and tents…
So are they, which is why they’re not letting AfD get a nose in.
Though look at the Netherlands, where PVV is in the coalition but at the price of its leader being excluded, and of the party having little real influence on government policy.
Now that the Germans have become teenagers and know everything, they will kick the US out of NATO and sell their crap to China. I read recently that Germany could not produce a competent military unit fit for combat. The US has allowed them to become soft and now they will see what it’s like not to have a bodyguard 24/7.
Merz will zig to the left now and ignore his promises. He’s already slammed Trump and stated Germany needs to be independent of the Americans. I have no problem with that. Time to leave Nato and withdraw our troops from Europe. Europe is now big enough economically and population wise that they can see to their own defense without our aid. They’ve burned enough of our treasure.
ding ding ding ….
winner winner chicken dinner
see how much free shit you can
give away when no one else is paying
for your protection.
Not all of Europe. A few bases in Italy, Greece etc to remain in the Med and have forward bases to go into the Middle East with our Navy and Airforce is pretty important.
He has no choice but to veer left if he wants to keep his illusion of power. He’s already done a 180 on closing the border because the SPD won’t tolerate it.
He’s not chancellor yet, and won’t be until he manages to get a coalition agreement with the left. For which he will have to pay them a hefty price in terms of policy. So nothing he says now can be trusted. He can say that he’d like to figure out a way to invite Netanyahu, but if the SDP insists on enforcing the “arrest warrant” he’ll have to concede that. It wouldn’t make sense to go to the wall on that issue and compromise elsewhere instead.
If I were Bibi I would be careful. Germany has a bad habit of sending Jews to the showers.
Sure, sure.
Because Jews have every reason in the world to trust the promises of Germans.
I wouldn’t trust any European nation regarding the ICC at this point.
Even if a country’s leader proclaims it is safe, there are always crazies who would take matters into their own hands and further the efforts of the ICC.
Merz is already backing away from his tough immigration talking points. Dude hasn’t even put together his governing coalition and the day after the election has revealed himself as fraudulent. The next elections in Germany may get very spicy with AfD having doubled its % share of the vote during an election with one of the highest voter participation rates in a decades.
He has to back away, because he only got 30%, and FDP is unfortunately gone. So he needs the left. Backing away from campaign postures isn’t fraudulent. A campaign position is a statement of what you’d like to do, if you are given the power to do it. If the public liked the CDU platform it should have given it enough seats to govern on its own and implement that platform. By giving it only 30% of the vote, and thus forcing it to seek a coalition with the left, the public said it doesn’t want the platform to be implemented completely. It wants compromise. So that’s what it will get. The eventual coalition will reflect the most important priorities of both the CDU and the SPD, and perhaps also the Greens, so no one will be happy with it, but it’s the result the voters dictated.
If the public wanted a CDU/AfD coalition it should have given AfD too many votes to ignore, as the Dutch public did to PVV. Even so, PVV got very little. It’s the largest party, but the one with the least influence. Next time the Dutch should give it so many seats that it’s impossible to keep it from power.
CDU isn’t ‘forced’ to join with the left SDP. They are choosing to do that b/c of some silly virtue signaling and b/c they don’t want to govern as they campaigned. In doing so they are rejecting the record 20% share the electorate gave AfD. His campaign posturing about addressing immigration is now revealed as so much BS to shore up support from wavering voters who want immigration dealt with more forcefully but were hesitant to pull the AfD lever due to lots of misinformation, outright propaganda, censorship and attempts to outlaw the AfD.
The establishment in many Nations is playing with fire in seeking to continue marginalizing and ignoring the demands of the growing center/right populism in the West. People are fed up with the ‘resistance’ antics and BS excuses. If their very real concerns continue to go unaddressed in meaningful ways the public may grow so impatient as to become very uncivil.
The boycott of AfD is not “silly virtue signaling”, it’s a key position that the CDU campaigned on. So why do you expect it to break that promise in order to keep some other ones?
The only way to achieve a government that would actually bring change would be to give the AfD so many seats that it’s impossible to form a government without it, and even then you’d get a situation like in the Netherlands where the PVV isn’t really doing much good because the mainstream parties freeze it out as much as possible.
The Netherlands won’t see real change until Geert is PM. And it’ll take something like that to force real change on Germany.
Milhouse,
You asserted that the CDU was being ‘forced’ to form a gov’t coalition with left b/c they only received 30%. That’s not true they could simply choose to form a coalition with AfD which got 20%.
Now you assert that the refusal to work with AfD was a campaign promise and thus isn’t what I called ‘virtue signaling’. The timeline of CDU making their virtue signaling pledge not to cooperate with AfD doesn’t alter the fact that the choice is ‘virtue signaling’. ‘Oh, AfD are ‘far right baddies’.
Your original post made the argument that campaign promises were in essence what they’d like to do given a sufficient majority and without which they’d have to alter their promises. Why would a partnership with AfD be any different?
Again the refusal to work with.AfD is a choice by CDU, not a requirement and no ‘force’ is being applied to impose it. It’s voluntary and rooted in virtue signaling disdain for a growing segment of the population….some of which pulled the CDU lever instead of AfD based on the campaign promises of CDU to be tough on immigration and on the smear campaign against AfD.
I enjoy an academic, tabletop discussion as much as anyone but at the end of the day these issues are real world problems. Sooner or later if a large enough segment of the population feels disenfranchised they may just march inside and overturn the tables.
I agree with CommoChief. The CDU made two promises: (1) we’ll join the firewall against AfD and (2) we’ll get immigration under control. I suspect they would have lost more votes if they only made promise #1, than if they’d only made promise #2. They didn’t even wait a week to break their promise on immigration. To me, the alliance with the leftists is like Mitch McConnell teaming up with Schumer instead of the MAGA Republicans. The AfD is hardly “far right”: It’s more like a MAGA party with some old fashioned Democrat party anti-semitism thrown in. Surely there’s more common ground between the CDU and the AfD than between the CDU and the socialists.
>>”Germany’s likely next Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, on Monday invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on an official visit to the country, rejecting a sham arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court (ICC).”
Yeah, right. Netanyahu would be a fool to set foot anywhere in the jurisdiction of the European Union. Especially since there’s that arrest warrant from the International Court out there. So I’d say if Merz wants to have a discussion with Netanyahu then they could do it over Zoom or whatever.
Lufthansa goes to Israel every day. Let Friedrich Merz go there. And take his wife Ethel with him.
No kidding. Remember when a Spanish judge had the UK arrest Pinochet and hold him under arrest for months. Maybe we should find a reason to put the ICC bureaucrats on a no-entry list to the US. And arrest them if they show up here. No reason they should be able to attack our allies (and our own citizens) with impunity.
That would also work. But what I said stands. Netanyahu would be a fool to travel to anywhere that would put him in the European Union jurisdiction.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tm_-ra1OFLo
Lucy and Ricky called. They want you and Ethel to come over for dinner.