‘Germany is back,’ said Friedrich Merz, the man likely to be elected as the new German Chancellor this coming week. What sounds like a promise to some and a threat to others is certainly a sign that the new German leadership will aim to take a more assertive role in European and world politics. Merz isn’t even chancellor yet, but he’s already keen to signal that he will take a more active interest in foreign policy than his predecessor.
The outgoing chancellor Olaf Scholz has gained a bit of a reputation for his reluctance to respond to international events, particularly the war in Ukraine. Shortly after the invasion began in 2022, he took such a low profile that ‘Where is Olaf?’ jokes were making the rounds. What Scholz called ‘Besonnenheit’ or ‘prudence’ was quickly labelled ‘Scholzing’ by the Ukrainians, defined as promising support only to delay it. The Chancellor’s relationship with some foreign leaders, particularly French President Emmanuel Macron, is so fraught that it exacerbated rather than relieved tensions.
Merz has ensured that foreign policy can be controlled from the chancellery
Merz wants to do things differently. Three days after his party won the national election in February, he travelled to Paris to see Macron and both vowed to begin a ‘new chapter’ of Franco-German relations. His first foreign visit as chancellor is also scheduled for France on 7 May, the day after his likely election to the post this coming week. Merz had previously sharply criticised Scholz’s conduct with the rest of Europe, even stating in a parliamentary discussion that he felt ‘ashamed’ on his behalf. So now he has a point to prove: that he can do it better.
There is no doubt that Merz has bigger ambitions for Europe and Germany’s role in it, particularly when it comes to economic policy. Central to this is his advocacy of a new trade deal between the European Union and the United States. ‘The best thing would be that we all go down to zero tariffs in transatlantic trade,’ he explain to German media, ‘then the problem is solved.’
‘I don’t want us to enter into an open trade war with the United States of America and the People’s Republic [of China],’ Merz told a conference of his conservative CDU party last week. Other than the abolition of all tariffs, he also pushed for an alignment on standards so that ‘comprehensive technical checks’ become redundant and further barriers to trade are removed.
This is an ambitious demand. Colleagues in Europe will be reminded of the failed negotiations for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership or TTIP agreement which ground to a halt during the first Donald Trump presidency. While an outright trade war was averted, negotiations never really gathered momentum again and were officially closed in 2019.
Merz might find a powerful ally in Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, who, despite being more explicitly critical of Trump than Merz, has offered the United States a deal to remove tariffs on all industrial goods. While a close ally of Merz’s rival and former German chancellor Angela Merkel, it shouldn’t be underestimated that von der Leyen is also a fellow German and a fellow CDU politician. She will be more acutely aware of Germany’s specific need to avoid a trade war with America than other European politicians. Merz should be able to increase Germany’s influence in Brussels where Scholz chose not to.
Far more so than Scholz, Merz seems to draw links between his domestic projects and the geopolitical conditions for them. Take energy policy. He basically wants to stick with the same energy plan Germany has followed for years: domestic renewables backed by imported gas. The latter has posed a major headache for Germany since the sanctions against Russia created a huge hole in the supply. More gas has been imported from the US in the form of LNG, and this could be expanded further. So if Trump wants the trade deficit between Europe and America addressed as part of a trade deal, Merz is unlikely to have an issue with energy being part of the answer. Trump has already suggested that a deal along those lines might be possible.
More fundamentally, the US is Germany’s most important trading partner. Germany’s economic model heavily relies on exports, and its fortunes are therefore tied to the flow of goods and services across the Atlantic. If Merz wants to stand a chance of pulling Germany out of its malaise in the short term, he must somehow overcome the conflict with Washington. So he will be making this a priority for himself rather than relying on his foreign minister’s initiative.
Under Scholz, the Foreign Ministry and the Chancellery were run by different parties whose interests weren’t aligned. Scholz is a centre-left Social Democrat. His foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, is from the Green party. Baerbock followed her own declared agenda of a ‘feminist foreign policy’, which, while never clearly defined, boils down to a value-driven approach rather than Realpolitik. She even had the name and portrait of Otto von Bismarck removed from the Foreign Office. The first-ever German Chancellor was not only an exceptionally skilled diplomat but also one of the most prominent proponents of the concept of Realpolitik. Scholz’s foreign-political reluctance gave Baerbock a lot of room, and Germany often spoke with two voices or none.
The new cabinet will be set up differently. Merz has nominated Johannes Wadephul as his Foreign Minister, a long-term MP with an amiable nature that is regarded as a typical characteristic of Germans, such as him, from the north of the country. He may seem a low-key appointment, but that is precisely the point. It’s not a coincidence that Wadephul will be the first CDU politician in that role in nearly six decades. He is a party colleague and ally. In effect, Merz has ensured that foreign policy can be controlled from the chancellery – no given in recent German politics.
Merz is as of yet a largely unproven political player in that he has never held a government role before and will jump in at the deep end in taking the top job in times of crisis. There is no telling whether Germany’s next chancellor has the mettle to identify and pursue German interests any more purposefully than the last. But what you can bank on is his ambition for a key role on the world stage.
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