By Deutsche Welle
13 Oct 2024, 11:58 AM EDT
The president of the United States, Joe Biden, Will travel to Germany at the end of next weeka few days after canceling a planned visit due to a strong hurricane in the state of Florida, as reported by the German magazine Spiegel this Sunday (10/13/2024) and confirmed by the dpa agency.
Biden, according to sources, will meet next Friday with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and President Frank-Walter Steinmeier in Berlinalthough there is no official confirmation in this regard. Biden had originally planned the trip for this weekend, but canceled on short notice amid forecasts of widespread devastation from Hurricane Milton, which is battering the US East Coast.
Biden had previously planned to spend two and a half days in Germany and visit the Ramstein air base, which the US Army maintains in the west of the country, to hold a summit on military aid to Ukraine, whose meeting was also postponed. Initial plans called for a later visit to Angola.
The visit to Germany was originally planned as a formal state visit with an official banquet and other formal events, but now the program has been largely condensed, Spiegel reports. However, the planned presentation by Federal President Steinmeier to Biden of the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit for his services to German-American friendship remains in place.
This will be Biden’s first bilateral visit to Germany in his four years in office.. Although the US president attended the G7 summit in Elmau in 2022 and made stops with his government plane to refuel at the Ramstein military base on other occasions, he did not make a state visit to Germany. Neither he nor any other American president in almost forty years, since Ronald Reagan to Bonn in 1985.
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• Hurricane Milton left more than 3 million people without power, thousands of evacuees and at least 10 dead in Florida