Merz cancels Trump call after the White House cheers AfD's Saxony-Anhalt win

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz cancelled a scheduled Wednesday phone call with President Donald Trump hours after Trump praised Alternative for Germany's win in Saxony-Anhalt.

Spokesman Stefan Kornelius refused to give a reason. He did say the cancellation was not a diary clash. He also reminded reporters that Merz has often objected, in general terms, to foreign leaders commenting on German elections. No new date for the call has been set.

Trump wrote on Truth Social on Tuesday night, Washington time: "Wow! The Populist Party in Germany just had a really big night. They finally got tired of the absolutely horrible Immigration rules and regulations which have hurt Germany so badly. THEY ARE ON THE RISE, and not going to take it anymore! MGGA!!! President DJT."

AfD took about 44 percent in Sunday's state election in Saxony-Anhalt, in eastern Germany. It is the first time a party of the far right has won a German state election since 1945. The result does not automatically make AfD the governing party in Magdeburg. Coalition arithmetic in the state parliament still has to be worked through. It does give the party a claim on the first attempt to form a government, and it hardens Merz's problem inside his own camp.

On Wednesday, in the Bundestag, Merz accused AfD of pursuing ethnic cleansing. He clashed with party leader Alice Weidel over her remigration programme, a mass-deportation plan she has not dropped since the vote. Merz has spent months calling AfD racist and a threat to the constitutional order. The Saxony-Anhalt number now sits behind those sentences.

The cancelled call lands on a relationship that was already strained. Earlier this year Merz said the United States had been humiliated by Iran. Trump then announced a drawdown of U.S. forces in Germany. The two men still have to talk about that deployment, about Ukraine, and about the war with Iran that has pushed oil above $100. They will now do so without this week's slot.

AfD's vote share in the east has been building for a decade. Saxony-Anhalt is poorer than the western states, older, and more exposed to the argument that Berlin's migration rules were written for someone else. Trump's post took that argument and restated it in American campaign English. Merz's office treated the post as interference even while declining to say so in a single sentence.

The chancellor is fighting on three fronts at once: with the White House, with Weidel in the chamber, and with voters who have now given AfD a state-level first. A phone call with Trump would have forced him to hear the praise repeated in private or to spend the call rebutting it. Cancelling the slot postpones that choice. It does not remove the 44 percent, and it does not rewrite Trump's post.

What happens next in Magdeburg will decide whether AfD's Sunday night becomes a governing experiment or a protest peak. What happens next between Berlin and Washington will decide whether the cancelled call was a one-day snub or the start of a longer freeze while both capitals manage an energy shock and a European election calendar that now has a far-right state winner on it.

Saxony-Anhalt is not a large state. It is large enough, after Sunday, to force every other state party to explain why the same argument would or would not travel west. Merz's Union still governs in Berlin with a firewall against AfD. That firewall is easier to describe than to keep once a state electorate has handed the party 44 percent and a first-place finish.

Trump's MGGA line will be quoted in German campaign ads without any further help from the White House. Merz's cancelled call will be quoted too. Both men now own a public record of the week: one posted a celebration, the other declined to pick up the phone, and the state result stays on the board.