| Welcome to Balance of Power, bringing you the latest in global politics. If you haven’t yet, sign up here. The candidates are chosen and the posters are up, as campaigning for Germany’s snap Feb. 23 election gets under way in earnest. But there’s an elephant in the room: Donald Trump’s inauguration one week today. For some, the incoming US president represents an injection of unpredictability that could harm their own political fortunes. But for the far-right AfD party, Trump and his billionaire backer Elon Musk are symbols of what it might achieve. Chancellor Olaf Scholz, fighting an uphill battle to bring the Social Democrats back into contention, told a party congress in Berlin on Saturday that forces in America he declined to name were “working very specifically to destroy our democratic institutions in the West.”  CDU leader and poll frontrunner Friedrich Merz. Photographer: Maria Feck/Bloomberg Friedrich Merz, whose conservative Christian Democratic-led bloc is leading in the polls, publicly played down the president-elect’s impact on Germany’s vote. But sources say his advisers see Trump’s return as a watershed event that could shift the electoral calculus, potentially even playing to Scholz’s favor. What is clear is Trump’s threat to impose trade tariffs on partners and rivals alike would hit Germany’s export-driven economy hard at a time when it’s already weakened. And his bid to end Russia’s war on Ukraine on uncertain terms and demands to further raise defense spending risk piling pressure on Berlin, whoever is chancellor. Then there’s Musk’s endorsement of the AfD, which is shunned by other parties so unlikely to enter government but polling in second place regardless. The AfD yesterday confirmed Alice Weidel as its first-ever candidate to be chancellor. Echoing Trump’s US plans, she backed mass deportations of undocumented migrants. Germany is one of a dwindling band of European nations to have resisted the populist right’s advance into government. That status as a postwar bulwark against nationalism is about to be tested like never before. — Alan Crawford  Once-thriving industrial communities like Düren, near the Hambach open-pit mine, are on the front line of the political fallout from Germany’s economic woes. Photographer: Ben Kilb/Bloomberg | 
