In the final days of Germany’s abbreviated election campaign, the task facing its next chancellor has snapped into focus. It appears far more existential, for the country and for all of Europe, than almost anyone initially imagined.

Germany’s coalition government came apart just a day after the U.S. presidential election last November. As a result, a vote that was supposed to come this September is now set for Sunday. German leaders quickly realized that meant their campaign would be largely fought in the early days of President Trump’s second term.

They were nervous from the start. But they were nowhere near prepared.

In just a few short weeks, the new Trump team has cut Ukraine and Europe out of negotiations to end the war with Russia, and embraced an aggressive, expansionist regime in Moscow that now breathes down Europe’s neck. It also threatened to withdraw troops that have protected Germany for decades.

How Germans vote will now be a critical component of Europe’s response to Mr. Trump’s new world order, and will resonate far beyond their borders.

“It is not just another change of government” under Mr. Trump, Friedrich Merz, the leading candidate for chancellor, warned on Friday after taking the stage for an arena rally in the western town of Oberhausen, “but a complete redrawing of the world map.”

Perhaps no one has distilled the stakes of the election more succinctly — ironically enough — than the prime minister of Greece, a country that famously clashed with the Germans when it was digging out of a financial crisis a decade ago. Kyriakos Mitsotakis, a fellow conservative, addressed Mr. Merz in a recorded message broadcast to 4,000 attendees at the Oberhausen rally. He reminded the audience of Greece’s emergence from its economic woes, and encouraged Mr. Merz to engineer a similar turnaround.

“Dear Friedrich,” Mr. Mitsotakis said, “Germany and Europe need your leadership.”

Mr. Merz and other candidates, including the current center-left chancellor, Olaf Scholz, have warned of strained or even severed ties with the United States, while vowing to fill a continental and global leadership vacuum.

Mr. Merz openly questioned this past week whether the United States would remain a democracy much longer — or slip into full autocratic rule — and whether NATO would continue to exist. Mr. Scholz has said that Germany and Europe must be prepared to go it alone without Mr. Trump.

The question is what any of the candidates will be able to do about that.

Germany has been weakened by crises at home and abroad. The country’s export-driven industrial business model is broken. Its economy is no larger today than it was five years ago, and it is losing ground to the rest of Europe and other wealthy nations on several key measures of economic health.

Its domestic politics are mired in disputes about immigration, regulation, government spending and the mountains of paperwork that Germans must navigate to deal with daily tasks.

Among the other challenges for Germany is that Trump administration officials, including Vice President JD Vance and Elon Musk, have also embraced a hard-right political party, the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, that revels in Nazi slogans and is ostracized by all of the country’s mainstream parties.

Its likely second-place finish on Sunday is expected to heighten the sense of fracturing and potential paralysis in German politics.

The last German chancellor to be seen as a leader of Europe was Mr. Merz’s longtime party rival, Angela Merkel. She did so in part by forging a partnership with President Barack Obama. The current moment might demand the opposite.

No European head of state has emerged to lead the continent in opposition to Mr. Trump’s foreign policy or his economic plans, including threats of tariffs that could target European companies. Two leaders who might have filled that role, President Emmanuel Macron of France and Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain, have been hurt in their efforts by low approval ratings at home.

Nonetheless, they will travel separately to the White House this week, hoping to at least persuade Mr. Trump to slow the pace of his possible disengagement from Europe.

It could be weeks or months for a new German leader to join them. Even after the votes are counted, the winner will need to form a governing coalition, a historically plodding process.

Polls suggest that Mr. Merz will almost certainly not win a majority in Sunday’s vote, and that he could enter with relatively low approval ratings for a chancellor-to-be. Still, his fresh face could provide a jolt Europe needs.

“With a waning or even unreliable U.S. presence on the continent,” said Sudha David-Wilp, the vice president of external relations of the German Marshall Fund in Berlin, “Merz could be the chancellor at the right moment to heed the call.”

The incumbent, Mr. Scholz, has been hindered globally ever since his government crumbled last fall. He is now polling in third place, behind Mr. Merz and the AfD — a party that no other mainstream party will invite into government.

Mr. Scholz has shed some of his stoic image in recent days and grown more combative, both toward Mr. Trump and toward Mr. Merz. He promised stronger German leadership to nearly 2,000 supporters at his final campaign stop on Friday. He was in Dortmund, one of the last remaining strongholds for his Social Democratic party, and just an hour down the road from Mr. Merz’s rally.

“I find it irritating how everyone is now surprised by the current American administration. You could read all of this beforehand,” Mr. Scholz said. “And in this respect, we as Germany must also be capable of acting, namely by solving our problems in Germany and Europe and by sticking together in doing so.”

“We can do this,” he added. “The European economic area, with its 450 million inhabitants, is larger and stronger than the United States. We can manage our own affairs.”

Polls suggest that Mr. Scholz is a long-shot to retain his job. The more intense guessing game among German political analysts is what sort of coalition might emerge from Sunday’s result, with Mr. Merz at the helm — and how much it might help or hurt Mr. Merz’s global ambitions.

If his Christian Democrats win around a third of the vote, or if only a few other parties pass an electoral threshold for taking seats in Parliament, Mr. Merz could likely form a government with just one other party.

He has said that would never be with the AfD, parts of which Germany’s domestic intelligence agency considers extremist, though together they are expected to have a majority.

If the vote is more splintered and more parties clear the threshold, Mr. Merz could be forced into a three-party coalition. As Mr. Scholz learned, three-party governments tend to be more fragile, and more prone to infighting that slows down major legislation.

Being forced into a larger coalition, many Christian Democrats and their supporters concede, would almost certainly sap Mr. Merz’s power to push deregulation, tax cuts and other domestic initiatives through Parliament in a bid to boost the economy.

And if Mr. Merz is unable to reignite growth, analysts say, he will struggle to project the economic power needed to lead Europe — or to find the revenue to help Germany accelerate its rearmament.

Mr. Merz betrayed few worries on Friday, flogging his potential future coalition partners, including the Social Democrats and the Green Party, in his speech in Oberhausen.

“We look forward to seeing you here again in a few years,” he told the crowd — four years from now, perhaps, at the end of the next federal election campaign.

“Then we will look back at this year 2025, on the federal elections and the results,” he said. “And then we will be asked whether we have correctly assessed the situation, and whether we have drawn the right conclusions from it.”

The Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, with its anti-immigrant and nationalist platform, has long been the pariah of German politics. Its members have been fined for Nazi slogans and labeled extremist by the government.

Ahead of Sunday’s national parliamentary election, a new band of influencers has found a voice among voters by bringing a more youthful edge to the party known for its provocations and controversies. They welcome the scorn of protesters, journalists and the mainstream political parties. Some of them still trade jokes about Hitler and Jews, along with the occasional Sig Heil salute.

Their party’s energy and ethos has won approving nods from Elon Musk, an adviser to President Trump, and from Vice President JD Vance. And they have helped elevate the party to second in the polls, even as the political establishment has kept the AfD out of government as part of a longstanding commitment to sideline parties deemed extreme.

They are the changing face of the AfD.

When Marie-Thérèse Kaiser, 28, first went to an AfD event in 2017, she was surrounded by retirees. “They could have been my grandparents,” she said. Things have changed. Young people who might have been punks or hippies in a different time are now finding the AfD, she said — and posting about it.

Ms. Kaiser is a parliamentary candidate and a personal assistant in the office of Alice Weidel, the leader of the AfD. She canvassed for the party on a frigid Saturday morning in Sittensen, a small town outside Hamburg. She picked the spot because she had been uninvited from a panel discussion there because of lingering controversy over a social media post that violated a law against hate speech.

In 2021, Ms. Kaiser on Facebook criticized Germany’s acceptance of immigrants from Afghanistan. In the post, she asked Hamburg’s mayor whether he was creating a “welcome culture for gang rapes?” The government fined her 6,000 euros ($6,275) and convicted her of inciting racial hatred. Her online following grew.

Other young activists have embraced confrontation to win votes and gain followers.

On a recent Saturday, Michelle Gollan, 23, stood in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin with a stern look on her face. She held a microphone adorned with the name of her YouTube channel, “eingollan,” which has nearly 200,000 subscribers.

Her poster read “remigration,” considered AfD code for deportations. The dot on the “i” has been replaced by a pink AfD arrow.

She was trying to attract protesters to talk to her, to feed a new video and, she said, introduce her viewers to new ideas. She succeeded with a woman with an anti-AfD sticker on her jacket and a rainbow flag draped around her shoulders, who briefly debated her.

The tense discussion left a huge grin on Ms. Gollan’s face: “For me, being provocative also means triggering people.”

Whenever the AfD rallies in the streets, as it did in Munich this month after a mother and child were killed by an immigrant in a car attack, protesters show up. And when protesters march against the party, as hundreds of thousands have done already in Berlin during this campaign, young AfD activists show up in turn.

At such demonstrations, Christopher Tamm, 24, likes to wear a hoodie emblazoned with the logo of the AfD’s youth wing, which is classified as extremist by German intelligence. “I openly say that I am right-wing, that I stand for right-wing politics,” Mr. Tamm said.

The next morning, near Hamburg, an AfD supporter waved good morning to fellow volunteers who were canvassing for the elections. He left his hand up in a Hitler salute, which is illegal in Germany. “Keep your arm up like this a bit longer,” he said.

Being provocative and promoting fear and hate work well on social media, but that tone shouldn’t be adopted by a mainstream party, said Emilia Fester, 26, a member of Parliament from the Greens party. Ms. Fester isn’t shy about speaking out against the AfD. Whenever it spreads lies or disinformation on social media, she said, “That is something one must clearly call out and limit.”

The young AfD activists are an extension of a party that has found support in many corners of Germany since its founding in 2013. It is a party no longer defined by a single demographic, but infused more broadly into a society where many still see the AfD as far-right extremists. In doing so, they have created their own counterculture.

Wutbürger, a German rock band whose name translates to “enraged citizen,” started out making patriotic anti-establishment music. It has since embraced a far-right identity and fan base, forging close ties with some AfD politicians. It has also been classified as a “right-wing extremist group” by a state government in Germany.

The band’s song “Walhalla,” including the lyric “we send our enemies back to the Orient,” has gone viral.

“We achieved our own counterculture. Our own music, our own rap culture, our own rock culture,” said Andy Habermann, the band’s leader. “We don’t hear the mainstream anymore, we don’t see them on TV, we don’t listen to the mainstream anymore on the radio. We know they are filtered, sadly. We have no more trust.”

Pope Francis was in critical condition on Saturday night after having a long “asthmatic respiratory crisis” earlier in the day that required “high flows of oxygen” as well as a blood transfusion, the Vatican said, adding to concerns about the health of the 88-year-old pontiff.

The announcement indicated that Francis’ medical condition had become more complicated since an update from his doctors on Friday evening, when he was also said to be in critical condition.

“The pope is not out of danger,” the Vatican said on Saturday evening.

As the pope’s hospital stay enters a second week, questions have grown about whether Francis — the spiritual leader of almost 1.4 billion Roman Catholics worldwide — will recover, pass away, or manage to fight his infection but emerge physically diminished.

The damage to his lungs was already chronic, and in recent days a few cardinals have openly spoken about the possibility of Francis resigning, as his predecessor Benedict XVI did in 2013.

A death or resignation would prompt a conclave of the church’s cardinals, who would elect a successor.

In an interview with Milan daily Corriere della Sera on Saturday, Pope Francis’ secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, spoke of “useless speculation.” The only thing that mattered, he said, was “the Holy Father’s health, his recovery, his return to the Vatican.”

Francis was hospitalized on Feb. 14 with a respiratory tract infection that developed into pneumonia in both lungs. As a young man, Francis had part of a lung removed.

But the Vatican said on Saturday that Francis was alert and sitting up in an armchair, “though he was in more pain than yesterday.”

The blood transfusion was necessary because tests showed low platelet counts, associated with anemia, the Vatican said.

On Friday, his doctors had said that Francis was in critical condition and would remain in the hospital for at least another week.

His surgeon Sergio Alfieri said that the pope understood the risk of death at his age and had told him, “all doors were open.”

Speaking to reporters gathered at Policlinico Agostino Gemelli, the hospital where Francis is being treated, Dr. Alfieri had described the difficulties the pope’s medical team was facing to calibrate the right treatment for the pontiff, who has pneumonia but also a complex infection.

The pope’s medical doctor at the Vatican, Luigi Carbone, said that as in the case of any fragile patient, it would take very little for a medical situation “to become unbalanced.”

The doctors said that Francis was intermittently using oxygen.

This is the fourth time Francis has stayed at the Gemelli hospital. In 2021, he had colon surgery there. In 2023, he was admitted for a respiratory infection, but went home after three days. He was hospitalized again a few months later to undergo abdominal surgery for a hernia.

Dr. Alfieri, who performed both abdominal surgeries, said on Friday that when it came to those medical conditions, Francis was fine. The pope’s heart was strong, he added.

In recent years the pope has been prone to bouts of influenza and bronchitis during the cold winter months. Because of knee problems and sciatica, he often uses a wheelchair, walker or cane.

In the days after the Vatican announced on Feb. 6 that Pope Francis had bronchitis and would be restricting his activities to his residence, he proceeded to hold multiple private audiences a day with groups of nuns, pilgrims and leaders of foundations.

On Feb. 9, he presided over an outdoor Mass in St. Peter’s Square, where the wind was so strong that it blew his white zucchetto off his head. He could not finish his homily, passing it to an aide and saying, “I have trouble breathing.”

Three days later, at his weekly Wednesday audience, the ailing pope had an aide read his speech. But then he shook hands with dozens of prelates, many leaning over to whisper greetings, and took photos with Spanish faithful, Milanese military recruits and nuns from Mother Teresa’s order.

Two days after that, Francis was rushed to the hospital, with what doctors said was a complex medical condition that evolved into pneumonia in both his lungs. In an update on Saturday night, the Vatican said that the pope was in critical condition after having a long “asthmatic respiratory crisis” earlier in the day.

Many who know him said in interviews that Francis, driven by a sense of mission and a discipline born of his early training, essentially worked himself into the hospital.

He is now bedridden after weeks of ceremonies and audiences — both private and public — that only intensified with the start in December of the 2025 Jubilee, a year of faith, penance and forgiveness of sins that takes place only every quarter century.

But the pope’s grueling schedule — which would exhaust anyone, let alone an 88-year-old with a series of health issues — is in keeping with Francis’ personality and with his vision of the papacy, say doctors, biographers and Vatican observers.

“The pope cares a lot about the Church, so it’s clear he put the Church first,” Dr. Luigi Carbone, the pope’s personal physician at the Vatican, told reporters at a briefing at the hospital on Friday.

Dr. Sergio Alfieri, another one of the pope’s doctors, added that “he doesn’t hold back because he is enormously generous, so he tired himself out.”

Francis became pope late in life — he was 76 — and was determined to make the most of it because he suspected that, relatively speaking, he would not hold the position for long. A year into his papacy, he told reporters that he thought he would be pope for two or three years, then “off to the house of the Father.”

That prediction was clearly wrong. Instead, he established a schedule — waking up before 5 and at his desk by 6 to tackle a full day of work — that Nelson Castro, the author of the book “The Health of Popes,” called “crazy.” Just last September, Francis took the longest and most complicated trip of his tenure: an 11-day, four-country tour in the Asia-Pacific region.

“For Francis, it’s all or nothing,” said Austen Ivereigh, a Catholic commentator and papal biographer. In Francis’ view, it was “an essential dimension of the papacy” that people had constant access to him, and there was no time to be inaccessible for health reasons.

“His primary concern isn’t to extend his life, his primary concern is to exercise the papal ministry in the way that he believes it must be exercised, which is all in, 100 percent,” Mr. Ivereigh said.

“He has a crazy agenda,” said another biographer, the Argentine journalist, Elisabetta Piqué. Alongside his official morning schedule, he has a parallel, equally full agenda for the afternoon. “He always says, I’ll have time to rest in the next world,” she said.

Francis had a deep-seated sense of duty that was instilled in him by the boarding school he attended as a child, run by the Salesian religious congregation, and later by the Jesuit order which he joined in 1958, said Fabio Marchese Ragona, another biographer.

He said that Francis had told him that he had joined the Jesuits “above all for the discipline,” and that keeping commitments was drilled into him — as was arriving early for appointments.

Carlo Musso, who worked with Francis on “Hope,” an autobiography that was published last month, noted: “The word he used most, the exhortation I remember best, is ‘forward.’ Even when he was looking back, it was so he could move forward.”

People who know Francis say that he is resistant to taking a break, even when he should because of sciatica, a bad knee or recurrent bronchial woes. As a young man, he had the upper lobe of his right lung removed, and he has suffered bouts of influenza and bronchitis during the winter months.

“He’s so obstinate; he’s a testardo,” said Dr. Castro, using the Italian word for stubborn. And the pope has admitted to being “a very difficult patient,” he added.

The pope once told him that he liked to keep his distance from doctors, Dr. Castro said, “meaning that he wants to make the decisions” about what he can and cannot do.

Mr. Ivereigh said that Francis had admitted that one of his “big faults” was obstinacy. “He’s very strong willed and doesn’t readily listen to suggestions that he cut things back,” he said.

Mr. Musso pointed out that a few hours before he was taken to hospital, Francis held audiences with the prime minister of the Slovak Republic, the president of CNN and representatives of a charity that works in Puerto Rico. “He has an enormous capacity for work,” he said.

The pope does not go away for summer vacations, Mr. Musso added. That habit, said Ms. Piqué, is a source of chagrin for many Vatican employees. His last real vacation was in 1975, Francis himself said in his autobiography “Hope.”

John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI summered at the papal residence in Castel Gandolfo, though the former also opted for mountain stays in northern Italy.

Francesco Antonio Grana, a Vatican reporter for the Rome daily newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano, said it did not help that Francis surrounded himself with “yes men” who indulged the pope.

“This hospitalization could have been avoided” had someone put the brakes on the pope’s schedule, Mr. Grana said.

“I prefer a live pope than a pope who died because he kept one more commitment on his agenda,” he added. “With Donald Trump in the White House, the world needs a live and combative pope.”

The same week that he went into the hospital, Francis wrote an open letter to bishops in the United States criticizing President Trump’s policy of mass deportations of immigrants, and he has stood up to Mr. Trump on issues like climate change.

Francis’ workload was not only arduous but also brought him into contact with hundreds of people who could potentially transmit diseases, said Massimo Andreoni, professor emeritus of infectious diseases at the University of Rome Tor Vergata. “So perhaps he should be more careful when he has a cold or bronchitis and maybe slow down a little and look after himself a little more,” he added.

There are a few signs that the pope may be ready to slow down.

Francis was visited in the hospital on Wednesday by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy. Reporting on the meeting, the Milan daily newspaper Corriere della Sera wrote that Francis complained to the prime minister: “The doctors said I have to take some time off” and that “I have to be careful with my health, otherwise I go straight to heaven.”

At a news briefing on Friday, Francis’ doctors made clear they would keep him at the hospital as long as he needed treatment that he could only receive there, rather than bring him home to his residence in Casa Santa Marta.

“We think it’s prudent,” said Dr. Alfieri. “If we brought him to Santa Marta, he’d start working like before, we know this.”

A man went on a stabbing rampage in a small city in France on Saturday, killing one person and injuring several more in what President Emmanuel Macron called “an Islamist terrorist attack.”

“It was a terrorist attack, there’s no doubt — an Islamist terrorist attack,” he said, adding that the government was determined “to root out terrorism in our country.” The police said they were investigating the stabbing as a terrorist attack.

The man, identified by France’s interior minister as an Algerian national who had been flagged to return to his home country, targeted a market in Mulhouse, a city about 70 miles south of Strasbourg, near France’s borders with Germany and Switzerland.

As he began his attack, the 37-year-old was heard shouting, “Allahu akbar,” according to France’s antiterrorism police. The Arabic phrase, meaning “God is great,” is an everyday expression used in religious and nonreligious settings alike, but has also become a war cry in some terrorist attacks by Islamic fundamentalists.

A civilian who tried to stop the man was killed, the police said. Three police officers were also injured in the attack, two of them seriously.

The man, who was arrested at the scene, has not been identified by name, but was on France’s terrorist watch list, Nicolas Heitz, Mulhouse’s prosecutor, told French media. He was registered on a list of persons the government is monitoring for potential radicalization, and who by law are obligated to leave French territory after the authorities have rejected their residence or asylum applications, according to Mr. Heitz.

France had asked the Algerian authorities, including the consulate, to repatriate the man, but they did not comply with the country’s requests, France’s interior minister, Bruno Retailleau, told TF1 television news.

Algerian authorities were not immediately available for comment because of the late hour.

The interior minister later traveled to Mulhouse, where he surveyed the shuttered market.

“Horror has just swept over our city,” Michèle Lutz, Mulhouse’s mayor, said in a post on Facebook.

Ukraine on Saturday was seriously considering a revised American proposal for its vast natural resources that contains virtually the same provisions that Kyiv previously rejected as too onerous, according to Ukrainian officials and a draft of the deal.

In fact, some of the terms appear even tougher than in a previous draft. The latest proposal comes after a week in which President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine resisted signing the earlier version in a public dispute with President Trump.

The proposed agreement would significantly shift onto a mercantile footing the United States’ three-year alliance with Ukraine in the largest war in Europe since World War II. The conflict to date has largely been seen as a struggle to secure Ukraine and the European continent from an authoritarian threat from Russia.

The Trump administration’s terms could also strip Ukraine of some funds that are now mostly invested in the country’s military and defense industry, and that could help rebuild the country once the war is over.

The terms of the new proposal, which is dated Feb. 21 and was reviewed by The New York Times, call for Ukraine to relinquish to the United States half of its revenues from natural resources, including minerals, gas and oil, as well as earnings from ports and other infrastructure. A similar demand was made in a previous version of the deal, dated Feb. 14 and reviewed by The Times.

Ukraine had been floating the prospect of a partnership with the United States on its valuable natural resources as a way to persuade Mr. Trump to provide additional support for its war effort. Mr. Zelensky had also been seeking security guarantees for Ukraine, a condition that was absent in the first draft agreement presented to him last week, prompting him to decline to sign the deal.

But while the new document calls for a series of commitments from Ukraine it still does not provide any specific security commitments in return from the United States. It says, however, that the United States intends to provide long-term financial support to help Ukraine develop economically.

The new document states that revenues from Ukraine’s resources would be directed to a fund in which the United States would hold 100 percent financial interest, and that Ukraine should contribute to the fund until it reaches $500 billion — the amount Mr. Trump has demanded from the war-torn country in exchange for American aid.

That figure far exceeds the country’s actual revenues from resources, which were $1.1 billion last year, and is more than four times the value of U.S. aid committed to Ukraine so far. The $500 billion sum was not mentioned in the previous version of the deal, though Mr. Trump had said publicly that it was what he wanted.

It is unclear whether Mr. Trump wants the funds in exchange for past American military and financial assistance, or whether it would also apply to future support.

Officials in Kyiv were studying the proposal on Saturday and deciding how to respond. Ukraine has not said whether it would agree to the deal under the proposed terms. Ruslan Stefanchuk, the speaker of Ukraine’s Parliament, told local media on Saturday that a government-level group would begin working on the agreement on Monday and that Ukraine wanted to receive specific security guarantees in exchange for access to its resources. It was not clear whether he meant that work would come before or after a deal is signed.

Ukraine has tried to resist bending to American demands on natural resources, but has faced intense pressure from President Trump, who views access to Ukraine’s mineral wealth as necessary repayment for the billions the United States has provided Kyiv for its war against Russia.

The document suggests the United States may send more aid to Ukraine in the future — but at a high price. It states that Ukraine will be required to contribute to the fund a sum equal to twice the amount the United States might give to Ukraine after the deal is signed.

The revised proposal states that the United States could reinvest a portion of the revenue into Ukraine’s postwar reconstruction, including by investing in the development of the country’s subsoil assets and infrastructure.

The new draft agreement also includes provisions for revenues from territories currently occupied by Russia, in the event they were freed: The share of resource revenues contributed to the fund from liberated areas would be 66 percent. Russia currently occupies about a fifth of Ukraine’s territory, including significant portions of the resource-rich Donbas region.

The document reviewed by The Times outlines the establishment of a fund to receive revenues from resource extraction and other sources. It lists as signatories Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Andrii Sybiha, Ukraine’s foreign affairs minister.

A second agreement, described as the Fund Agreement, would be concluded later to work out specific details.

Keith Kellogg, Mr. Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine and Russia, visited Kyiv from Wednesday to Friday and discussed the new proposal with Mr. Zelensky. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent first met with Mr. Zelensky recently to discuss the deal, and more recently Mr. Trump’s commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, became involved in the negotiations, according to three people familiar with the discussion.

A senior White House official said in a statement that a number of senior administration officials were “involved in the effort to end this brutal war” at the request of Mr. Trump.

A potential deal for Ukraine’s resources has been a major point of dispute in a rapidly deteriorating relationship between Mr. Zelensky and Mr. Trump. Their interactions became acrimonious in the last week as the American president assailed Mr. Zelensky in highly personal terms, calling him “an unelected dictator.”

The Ukrainian president, in turn, said that Mr. Trump was living in a “disinformation web” after Mr. Trump falsely claimed that Ukraine had started the war against Russia.

Mr. Zelensky’s initial hesitancy, and comments that were perceived by Mr. Trump and cabinet officials as public criticism of the president, prompted a fierce backlash from the Trump administration. That possibly led to the addition of further demands written into the agreement, according to drafts and people familiar with the discussions of the deal on the Ukrainian side.

Two of the people who had the new proposal described to them said that one of the few changes made by the United States that could satisfy Ukraine was the removal of a clause placing the deal under the jurisdiction of a New York court. The provision had raised concerns on the Ukrainian side, because it could weaken Ukraine’s legal standing in case of a dispute.

Whether Ukraine can meet the terms requested by the Trump administration is unclear.

Ukraine is not a major natural resource exporting country, as the most dynamic spheres of its economy have been agriculture, steel and other metal smelting and outsourced programming work for Silicon Valley companies. Revenues from natural resources comprised 2.5 percent of budget revenue last year.

Ukrainian officials and energy experts also say that any new fields would likely take years and significant investment to develop. Much exploration remains to be done to assess the true value of the country’s critical minerals, they say, and administrative and legislative obstacles still hinder foreign investment in the sector.

The Trump administration has suggested that the mere presence of American economic interests in Ukraine would be a security guarantee for Kyiv. Top U.S. cabinet members have pressed Mr. Zelensky to sign the deal in recent days.

“President Zelensky is going to sign that deal, and you will see that in the very short term,” the U.S. national security adviser, Mike Waltz, said on Friday. “And that is good for Ukraine. What better could you have for Ukraine than to be in an economic partnership with the United States?”

Speaking in the Oval Office later Friday, Mr. Trump said, “We’re going to either sign a deal, or there’s going to be a lot of problems with them.”

Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.

A month ago, no one would have ever mistaken Germany’s often taciturn chancellor for an aggressive political campaigner. But prowling the stage in a dark suit and open shirt with a microphone in hand, Olaf Scholz certainly looked like one on Friday night.

At a nearly euphoric rally for someone trailing in the polls, Mr. Scholz spoke for 50 minutes before supporters in Dortmund, one of only two German cities where his center-left Social Democrats are projected to win the majority.

He trumpeted his government’s achievements, like raising the minimum wage and bridging the loss of Russian gas after the invasion in Ukraine. He told the crowd he could still win. And he took a swipe at President Trump.

“If you translate what ‘transactional’ means specifically,” Mr. Scholz said, alighting on a word often used to describe the American president’s approach to politics, “it means I only think of myself and I only do what benefits me.”

Nearly 2,000 Social Democrats jumped to their feet and cheered. “I thought he was in good fighting form,” said Elisabeth Schnieder, 69, who joined Mr. Scholz Social Democrats, or S.P.D., after she retired from her job as a senior care aide.

“I just wish he had shown that side earlier.”

The Friday rally was Mr. Scholz’s last of the campaign ahead of Sunday’s vote. It was also possibly the last of his career.

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Ruwayda al-Aqaar was sleeping next to her husband and 3-year-old daughter in late December when they were awakened by the sound of approaching tanks and bulldozers. They rushed outside their small house and saw dozens of Israeli soldiers marching into their small farming village, she said.

“I was terrified,” Ms. al-Aqaar said recently in her home in the village of Suwaisah, in southeastern Syria, as her daughter watched “Tom and Jerry” cartoons. “We were afraid of being displaced and forced to leave our homes.”

For weeks, the family and their neighbors feared that Israeli forces would target their village after carrying out similar incursions into towns nearby. Just days after a coalition of Syrian rebels ousted President Bashar al-Assad in early December, Israel invaded border villages in Syria in what it described as temporary measures to protect its own security.

But the Israeli raids continued throughout January and into February, raising fears among Syrians that the incursions could become a prolonged military occupation. The Israeli troops have been targeting villages, particularly ones with military outposts.

In Suwaisah, the Israeli soldiers tore down a small military outpost that had been abandoned by Syrian troops who took their weapons with them after the Assad regime fell. And the Israelis demanded that residents hand over any weapons they may have had. This account of what happened is based on interviews with more than a dozen residents of Suwaisah and Al-Dawayah Al-Kabirah, a nearby village that was also raided, as well as photographs they shared from cellphones.

Suwaisah is a village of mostly one-story homes, its residents mostly farmers and herders. It was a little past 7 a.m. on Dec. 25 when the Israelis entered the village and were met by dozens of adults and children, residents said. Some of the Syrians tore off olive branches from nearby orchards as a symbol of peace, they said, adding that none of the residents who went out to meet the Israelis carried weapons.

“Syria is free, free,” the villagers chanted at the soldiers, who were armed with semiautomatic machine guns, “and Israel out!”

The Israeli military raids have terrified the villagers, who, like other Syrians, had celebrated the ouster of Mr. al-Assad and gathered in the streets, playing revolutionary songs and waving flags. But in this corner of Syria, the celebrations quickly dissipated into fear of an encroaching foreign army.

“They ruined our joy,” Ms. al-Aqaar said.

This part of southeastern Syria abuts the Golan Heights, territory that Israel captured from Syria during the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 and then annexed. The move is not recognized by most of the world, including the United Nations, which considers the land occupied.

Ms. al-Aqaar, like many Syrians in the region, feared that her village might meet the same fate.

Israel has in recent months seized a demilitarized buffer zone in the Golan Heights and territory in southwestern Syria — including Mount Hermon, the country’s highest point. It has also has carried out hundreds of airstrikes, destroying Syrian military assets, including tanks, weapons production facilities and air-defense systems, according to Syrian monitoring groups.

The Israeli military says it is acting “in order to protect the Israeli border.” Israel has long seen the Golan Heights as important to its security because it sits on the edge of Syria, Jordan and Lebanon, offering an important military vantage point. There is now concern in Israel that the fall of the Assad regime may have left a security vacuum in the area.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has signaled that the military would occupy the lands it has taken for the foreseeable future, “until another arrangement is found that guarantees Israel’s security.”

Israeli forces continue to conduct cross-border incursions into Syria with bulldozers and armored vehicles, according to Etana, a Syrian reporting and analysis organization. On Jan. 16, an Israeli airstrike struck a Syrian government convoy, killing at least two people, including a mayor, according to Etana and another Syrian monitoring group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

They have raided former Syrian Army bases in the southern provinces of Quneitra and Daraa to demolish property, occupy land and demand residents hand over any weapons, Etana reported.

“This available evidence indicates that Israel may be expanding and entrenching its occupation over areas of Quneitra Province,” the group said in a report in January.

Israel’s recent incursions and taking of the buffer zone in the Golan Heights violates the 1974 agreement between the two countries that followed the end of the 1973 war, according to the United Nations. After that conflict, both sides had agreed that U.N. peacekeepers would monitor a 155-square-mile demilitarized zone between their forces.

The Israeli incursions have been condemned internationally. The United Nations said in January that “Syria’s sovereignty, territorial unity, and integrity must be fully restored.”

And in December, Geir Pedersen, the United Nations special envoy for Syria, called on Israel to halt its “very troubling” military attacks.

Ahmed al-Shara, the leader of Syria’s new government, has criticized Israel for its incursion, saying it was a violation of the 1974 armistice agreement.

Shadi al-Mleihan, a journalist who lives in Suwaisah, said he was among those who confronted the Israeli forces when they entered his village in December.

“We have been in a war for nearly 14 years,” he said. “We don’t want another war.”

In addition to destroying the outposts, the soldiers demanded that residents hand over any weapons in the village, Mr. al-Mleihan and other villagers said.

“They said you need to announce from the mosque speakers that we want all the weapons and if you won’t we have a megaphone,” Badir al-Krayat, Ms. al-Aqaar’s husband, said the soldiers told them. “We said, ‘We don’t have weapons; we are farmers.’”

As villagers confronted some soldiers, other troops were leveling the outpost, some olive trees and a small municipal building, several residents said. Two hours later, the soldiers withdrew toward Al-Dawayah Al-Kabirah, setting their sights on another abandoned Syrian military outpost there, residents said.

There, villagers gathered around the former outpost and sat on top of other structures in an effort to prevent the Israeli forces from destroying them. Then, according to multiple residents and a human rights group, Israeli troops fired on unarmed civilians.

At least five civilians, including a child, were wounded, according to residents and the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The Israel military said it “does not target its operations against civilians or civilian infrastructures.” In response to questions, the military said it “operated near the village in order to neutralize military infrastructures which posed a threat” to its forces.

“Several groups were observed approaching I.D.F. personnel in the area,” the military said. “After calling on the crowd to stand back and maintain a safe distance, individuals continued to advance towards the forces that responded with warning shots solely aimed at the air.”

Khalid al-Aaqal, 17, a high school senior, said he was among those shot in Al-Dawayah Al-Kabirah in late December. He said he and other villagers went to confront the Israeli troops, “and they started shooting” at the villagers’ feet with semiautomatic machine guns.

“We didn’t think they would shoot at us because we didn’t have any weapons,” Mr. al-Aaqal said.

His cousin was shot in the foot, Mr. al-Aaqal and his mother said, and when Mr. al-Aaqal went to rescue him, Mr. al-Aaqal was hit in both legs.

“They drowned our celebrations with their incursion,” said Alaa al-Aawad, 24, who was shot in the ankle and spoke as he lay on a pile of thin mattresses, his left leg propped up on a pillow.

Villagers in Suwaisah and Al-Dawayah Al-Kabirah said they were anxious about what comes next. The Israeli forces have left, but residents said they could still see them moving on two nearby mountain tops that the soldiers have seized.

“We don’t know what their goal is,” Hassan Muhammad, 32, who was one of the protesters who confronted the soldiers in Al-Dawayah Al-Kabirah, said of Israel. “But we as a people, our goal is to protect our lands. We just got rid of one tyrant and we don’t want another to come here and occupy it.”