Green’s bet to succeed Merkel urges curbs on China trade: FAS

Annalena Baerbock, the Green Party’s candidate to succeed Angela Merkel as chancellor, wants to tighten German and European trade policy toward China and impose higher tariffs if her party joins the next government.

“We must pay attention to compliance with standards when there is dumping in other regions,” Baerbock told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung newspaper.

Remedies suggested included “imposing a corresponding surcharge on companies that have been subsidized on the Chinese market,” she said.

Baerbock, 40, has taken a hawkish stance toward countries such as China and Russia, and has attracted the attention of the Kremlin in doing so.

Shortly after her nomination in April, she called for more pressure on Russia and ending political support for the Nord Stream 2 Baltic Sea gas pipeline.

Baerbock also called in the interview for a new industrial policy to compete with China, citing as an example Europe’s Airbus SE, which was created as means to take on the U.S. aerospace giant Boeing Co.

“European states should support consortia in sensitive areas,” Baerbock said. “We Europeans must define key technologies and cooperate between politics and business to ensure that we can produce such products in Europe.”

She reiterated her call for China’s Huawei Technologies to be kept out of Germany’s 5G network as “a security issue.”

Voter support for the Greens has fallen since Baerbock was nominated as the party’s candidate. The party dropped two percentage points to 19% in an FF Wahlen poll for ZDF public television released on Friday from a poll two weeks ago.

That compares with 26% for Merkel’s Christian Union-led bloc and 19% for the Social Democrats. Baerbock also trails the CDU’s Armin Laschet and the SPD’s Olaf Scholz in personal popularity.