CV
Michaela Küfner is Deutsche Welle’s Chief Political Editor. Like all of us, she has thrown her expectations of what the post-Merkel era will look like, overboard in recent weeks. Every day over the past month she has been reporting on German Chancellor Olaf Scholz overturning yet more of Germany's past political certainties.
Traveling with the German Chancellor to Moscow just ten days before Vladimir Putin attacked Ukraine, she became the last Western Journalist to ask Russia's president directly whether he would wage war in Europe. Putin insisted he did "not want war"... we all know the rest. As Olaf Scholz maps out a new leadership role for a Germany, Michaela Küfner analyses how far that political will stretches into his own government coalition and how able Germany as a society is to live up to the new expectations of Europe's largest economy.
Trained as a journalist in Britain, Michaela started her journalistic career with BBC World’s ‘HARDtalk’ and “the world today” programmes. She analyzed democratic systems as an election observer for the EU and the OSCE in more than a dozen countries. In 2006 she also co- founded the Berlin-based NGO “Democracy Reporting International” which assesses and advises on frameworks for democracy.