(Bloomberg) -- German conservative lawmaker Jens Spahn said the government should seek a common strategy with US president-elect Donald Trump to boost transatlantic trade while reducing its economic dependency on China.
“We could say let’s have a common approach toward China,” Spahn said Wednesday in a Bloomberg TV interview in Berlin. “If you make it possible to have more transatlantic trade, we can do more toward China in the regard to de-risking,” he added. “You need to make deals, as Trump would call it.”
Spahn, a close ally of the conservative party’s Chancellor candidate Friedrich Merz, is likely to get a senior position in the next government as a result of snap elections scheduled for February next year. Opinion polls give the CDU and its Bavarian CSU sister party a significant lead over the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) in second place, with Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats in third.
“We are the only industrial country in the world which has a shrinking economy,” Spahn said. The CDU lawmaker said Germany would need to keep the debt brake, but called for cuts in social spending to offset an increase in investments and defense spending. “We need to make Germany strong again,” he said.
Germany is concerned that its already ailing economy could be further weakened by tariffs which Trump has threatened to impose. Bundesbank President Joachim Nagel has warned that levies could cost Germany 1% of output and, as a result, the economy could also shrink in 2025.
Spahn, 44, has been a member of the German parliament for more than two decades and served as parliamentary state secretary under former finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble between 2015 and 2018. Spahn drew criticism for his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic when he was health minister under then-chancellor Angela Merkel.
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