(MENAFN) German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has warned that the West is losing its global influence as “autocracies” challenge liberal democratic values, according to reports.

Speaking during a ceremony marking the 35th anniversary of German reunification on Friday, Merz noted that the “appeal of what we call the free West is visibly declining.”

“It is no longer self-evident that the world will look to us, that our values of liberal democracy will be emulated,” he added.

Merz highlighted that “new alliances of autocracies are forming against us and attacking liberal democracy as a way of life,” while threats to the Western order are also emerging “from within.”
In a similar vein, US Vice President J.D. Vance stated in May that after the Cold War, American leaders had assumed “American primacy” was guaranteed.

However, he acknowledged that “the era of uncontested US dominance is over,” pointing to “serious threats [represented by] China, Russia, and other nations determined to beat us in every single domain – from spectrum to lower Earth orbit to our supply chains and even our communication infrastructure.”

Vance added that Washington had focused excessively on “soft power” over recent decades and had a tendency to “meddle in foreign country affairs,” even when they had “very little to do with core American interests,” pledging that President Donald Trump’s administration would depart from such policies.

Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin, speaking at the Valdai Discussion Club in Sochi on Thursday, observed that the world is experiencing “rapid and drastic changes.”

“Multipolarity has become a direct consequence of attempts to establish and preserve global hegemony, a response… to the obsessive desire to arrange everyone into a single hierarchy, with Western countries at the top,” he argued.

Putin further asserted that democracy itself is in decline in the West, citing Romania as an example, where the country’s top court annulled last year’s presidential election results due to alleged fraud and foreign interference, preventing the frontrunner Eurosceptic right-wing candidate, Calin Georgescu, from participating in the rerun.

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