Merkel's likely heir favors her centrist path for Germany

Armin Laschet is a child of the Cold War who has long valued U.S. leadership and says he hopes for a big push forward on global challenges like climate change with the help of President Joe Biden

DUESSELDORF, Germany -- As a child of the Cold War in West Germany, Armin Laschet remembers when then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan came to Berlin in 1987, stood at the barrier separating East from West, and said, “Tear down this wall!” “For many West Germans, that was a utopia that didn’t seem realistic, but which fulfilled itself in the end,” said Laschet, who is seeking to succeed Angela Merkel as chancellor in the country's Sept. 26 election. The 60-year-old governor of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany's most populous state, is still grateful that in his youth the Americans were reliable guarantors of peace and stability against the Soviet Union. “They were always there for us, they secured the freedom of Berlin,” Laschet said in an interview this week with The Associated Press at his office in the western city of Duesseldorf.