(Bloomberg) -- It looks like German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is at the back of the line when it comes to getting access to the next Trump White House.
Scholz was a close ally of Joe Biden and openly backed the Democratic president before he withdrew from the race against Donald Trump. Now he seems to be paying the price.
The German leader reached out to Trump’s team on Wednesday to set up a call as soon as the election result became clear. As of Friday afternoon, he’s still waiting, his spokesman told Bloomberg on the sidelines of a summit in Budapest.
During Trump’s first term, he regularly treated Germany with contempt and railed against then-Chancellor Angela Merkel for what he saw as free-riding on US military spending.
Trump’s latest snub puts the current chancellor behind French President Emmanuel Macron, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Mette Frederiksen of Denmark, Germany’s northern neighbor with a population of just 6 million people.
Even Charles Michel has spoken to Trump this week, and he’s due to step down as president of the European leaders’ council at the end of the month.
Not only that, but Scholz has also been drawn into a humiliating spat with Elon Musk, the billionaire Tesla Inc. founder who has become one of Trump’s closest allies.
Musk welcomed the collapse of Scholz’s governing coalition on Wednesday night with a four-word message on his social media platform X: “Olaf is a fool,” he wrote in German. The post was viewed more than 42 million times — that’s almost four times as many votes as Scholz’s party got in the last federal election.
“I didn’t even take notice of it,” Scholz told reporters in Budapest Friday.
Scholz stressed that he is determined to keep up the good transatlantic relations, no matter who sits in the White House, but he’s not prepared to take Musk’s posts too seriously.
“The world we live in is not such that internet companies are state organs,” he said.
The widespread predictions of a role for Musk in the next Trump administration suggest that the German leader might need to revise his views of social media.
If he’s still in power by the time Trump takes office.
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