Eurasia Press & News
Friedrich Merz wants to be a foreign-policy chancellor. One might not have known it from Germany’s parochial federal election campaign, or the business-as-usual foreign-policy passages of the coalition deal between his Christian Democratic Union (CDU, along with its Bavarian partner the Christian Social Union, CSU) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD). But Germany’s incoming leader has pinned his colours to the mast. Unveiling the CDU members of his cabinet on April 28th, he asserted that everything else is subordinate to external security. Speaking to the ranks of the European centre-right in Valencia two days later, he conceded: “I know that many of you expect more German leadership than we have seen in the last years.”
The new chancellor intends to rise to challenge in an upcoming flurry of international meetings. Merz’s first week brings trips to Paris, Warsaw and Kyiv, all capitals where leaders felt the patchiness of German leadership and initiative under Olaf Scholz particularly acutely. He will spend much of June shuttling between summits: the G7 in Canada, NATO in The Hague, and then the European Council in Brussels. In each capital and at each conference, he will be met with high expectations—albeit partly due to both lingering disappointment at Scholz’s foreign policies and the paucity of alternative sources of optimism in what remains of the Western alliance.
Common sense, consolidation and cash
Three main reasons justify at least some of that optimism.
The first is that Merz has clearly diagnosed the problem. He has repeatedly lamented the “German vote” whereby Berlin, under Scholz, would often dither over EU decisions as coalition partners squabbled, and sometimes ended up abstaining. He has frankly acknowledged the loss of trust among European partners, especially the two other members of the Weimar Triangle, France and Poland. And he has been candid about the scale of the threat Donald Trump’s second term poses to Europe, even as other members of the European political mainstream still cling to business-as-usual. Of course, having the right diagnosis is not the same as acting on it effectively—but it is a necessary condition.
The second cause for optimism is that Merz seems to have internalised the most urgent lessons of Scholz’s failures. Germany’s “traffic-light” coalition started out with good intentions but became consumed by internal differences over foreign-policy making. At points the chancellor would deliver one message from the chancellery podium, then his foreign minister Annalena Baerbock would deliver a different one on the evening news. The result was bickering and navel-gazing.
In the new government, foreign policy will be consolidated primarily in the chancellery. This is not entirely new: it was the general direction over the past decades, and especially under Angela Merkel. But Merz wants to take that trend several steps farther. He will set up a National Security Council within the chancellery, led by his close aide Jacob Schrot (although his decision to subordinate it to the Chancellor’s office suggests its influence will remain somewhat limited). He will also power-up the chancellery by appointing Günter Sautter and Michael Clauss, both respected and independent-minded German diplomats, to lead its foreign and European sections respectively. For the first time since 1966, the chancellery and the foreign ministry will be in the hands of the same party, with Merz loyalist Johann Wadephul taking the reins of the latter.
Of course, there is also the SPD. Lars Klingbeil as vice-chancellor and finance minister, and Boris Pistorius, continuing as defence minister, will be important influences on Germany’s global role. But both are about as close to Merz on foreign policy as it gets in their party. As recently as 2020, leading SPD figures were warning of a “militarisation of foreign policy”, but Klingbeil and Pistorius both belong to the enthusiastically pro-NATO and pro-Ukraine wing of the SPD. As defence minister under Scholz, Pistorius called for a “war-ready” German army, warned of a possible Russian attack on NATO and pushed for a much larger defence budget.
That points to the third cause of optimism: Merz has money. This topic was what ultimately brought down Scholz’s coalition, forced by Germany’s debt brake to fudge defence spending increases and to battle over domestic priorities to the point where the whole thing fell apart. But Merz’s bold move, in the final weeks of the outgoing Bundestag, to loosen the debt brake with SPD and Green support, was the long-overdue fiscal Zeitenwende (turning point) that Germany needed. Creating €500bn of borrowing capacity for much-needed infrastructure investment and exempting defence and Ukraine spending beyond 1% of GDP from the brake has given the incoming chancellor the chance to succeed. It will enable him to commit to defence spending of 3% or even 3.5% of GDP at the NATO summit in June, helping to restore Germany’s European leadership role—and potentially helping Merz to head off intra-governmental and intra-coalition disputes over resources.
These three C’s—common sense about Germany’s foreign-policy reality, consolidation of foreign-policy decision making within the government, and cash to give substance to German leadership and smooth divides at home—should set up Merz to be the foreign-policy chancellor Europe needs.
Merz gonna Merz
But any optimism about the three Cs, in Paris, Brussels, Warsaw or elsewhere, should be qualified by two risks.
One possibility sees Merz dragged back from the world stage and into a new domestic political quagmire. After all, Germany’s incoming chancellor disappointed at the polls and faces a series of prospective rivals within his own camp, like Jens Spahn (incoming head of the CDU/CSU group in the Bundestag) and Markus Söder (CSU leader and minister-president of Bavaria). The SPD base has little love for him. While the party’s membership poll on the coalition delivered 85% support, the turnout was just 56%, meaning that fewer than half of members had actually backed it. Meanwhile the new “black-red” coalition’s majority in the Bundestag is just 12 seats; the far-right Alternative for Germany has topped polls in recent weeks; and the German economy remains in the doldrums. Such adversity is likelier to divide than to unite the government. Merz’s ability to control his own impulsivity may mark the difference between the two possibilities.
The other risk is that the chancellor himself turns inwards. We previously defined the “Merz doctrine” as the fusion of his “Europeanist”, “Germany first”, and “Atlanticist” instincts. Trump has greatly curbed the last of these. But that leaves the first two in tension. Merz has always moved between a genuine commitment to European cooperation and a German conservatism rooted in bourgeois patriotism, a decline in the federal republic’s sense of its own exceptionalism, and a businessman’s instinct for seeking a better deal. The historical moment demands Europeanism, but the domestic zeitgeist favours “Germany first”. Merz will have to reconcile the two.
Early tests will provide some answers: Does Merz coordinate with France and Britain to deliver Taurus missiles to Ukraine? Does he make Germany a meaningful partner to both in discussions over a reassurance force for a post-war Ukraine? Is his migration policy unilateralist or organised with Germany’s neighbours? Does he engage constructively in discussions over the future of Europe’s energy networks? Does Merz build a relationship with Trump while speaking for Europe at the NATO summit in June? The answers should be clear by the end of the summer, and will give a clear sense of what is to come.
The new Fritz
But the fundamental questions about Merz’s overall chancellorship are bigger still; indeed, they are European-history-shaping judgment calls. Ultimately, does Merz act on his recognition that Europe needs closer economic and military integration? Does his rhetoric on supporting Ukraine add up to a proportional German contribution to European deterrence of Russia? Do his economic and trade policies stake out Germany (and with it, Europe) in a genuinely sovereign space between the US and China?
In her forthcoming book “Merz: Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Mitte” (Merz: In search of the lost [political] centre), the journalist Mariam Lau writes: “Merz is a conservative in an era of authoritarians”. This line captures the incoming chancellor’s potential—and the scale of the challenge before him. Merz is the personification of the old German establishment, but must now lead his country through an age of radical upheaval. Its future will be significantly decided by the interaction between those two realities.
