DISCLAIMER: This article was first published on November 7, 2024
We’ve all seen the reactions to Tuesday’s news that Donald Trump had won the presidential election. However, the election’s outcome affected the rest of the world, and one European newspaper had an especially memorable reaction.
According to IB Times in the UK, the German newspaper Die Zeit replied to the news of Trump’s win with a single expletive:
view from europe this morning: pic.twitter.com/27VMdbqxJy
— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) November 6, 2024
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“Looking away doesn’t help, fear doesn’t help, and in the end all that’s left is helpless self-soothing. An election night in front of the TV,” the piece said in its subhead.
“Half past five is also a perfectly appropriate time for feeling helpless, for feeling sorry for yourself, for panicking and for sheer horror,” the author of the Die Zeit article wrote, per IB Times’ translation.
“This reaction from one of the country’s leading newspapers captured the shock and anxiety felt by many Germans who fear the global ramifications of Trump’s policies on alliances and European security,” the IB Times analysis said.
Trump’s victory was part of a recent trend in large Western democracies of incumbent parties falling to defeat, largely related to the perception of high inflation. According to CNBC, the American election result represents the “latest heavy blow to a struggling Germany,” which stands to potentially suffer from Trump’s plans to impose tariffs.
“Donald Trump’s likely election victory marks the beginning of the most difficult economic moment in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany,” Moritz Schularick, president of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, said in a note after the U.S. election, as reported by CNBC. “In addition to the domestic structural crisis, the country now faces massive foreign trade and security policy challenges for which we are not prepared.”
❌Goldman Sachs wasted no time in downgrading its 2025 growth forecasts for Europe.
🇩🇪DE is the worst hit, with a 0.4 percentage point cut to its 2025 growth forecast.
FR and IT cut by 0.2 pp each; Eurozone cut by 0.3 pp
— Carlo Martuscelli (@carlomartu) November 6, 2024
Also this week, Goldman Sachs announced that it was slashing its growth forecasts for Germany and other European countries.
“Much of the growth drag would come from higher trade policy uncertainty… the actual magnitude of tariff increases might matter less than the uncertainty created by (Trump) threatening to impose tariffs on Europe,” Goldman wrote in the note, as cited by CNN.
Photo courtesy of Political Tribune media library.
