Fiala's handover to Merz

Outgoing PM Petr Fiala's new Czechia 2025 state-of-the-nation report, which was released yesterday, was created on Dec. 7 and modified on Dec. 13. This means that Fiala had plenty of time to respond to Donald Trump's National Security Strategy. Yet Fiala's document doesn't mention the Strategy and says little about the new situation in transatlantic relations. Closest is perhaps the sentence, "We are incomparably better connected to the surrounding world and, at the same time, much less dependent on the fragile global balance in strategic terms." In his own weekend event, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz told CSU in Munich that there are tectonic shifts in the political and economic centers of power in the world. "And we, the Germans, the Europeans, are right in the middle of this process," he said. "Trump didn't appear overnight, and this American policy won't simply disappear overnight. It may be that with his successor, things will be even more difficult. Let's prepare for the possibility of a fundamental change in transatlantic relations." Andrej Babiš is about to do this, while Fiala and ODS are relying on Merz to do it for them.