Merz has an opportunity for greatness, but will he take it?

The wobbly start of the Merz government in Germany highlights the precarious condition of the party framework that has governed the Federal Republic since its founding in 1949. Throughout that time either the Christian Democrats or the Social Democrats have led the government either in a grand coalition between themselves as is the case now, or in league with some combination of Free Democrats and Greens. It is to the credit of the new chancellor that he expressed doubt about the propriety of the challenge to the new chief opposition party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), posed by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in designating it as an extremist organisation. There are some extremists in almost every political party and to proceed to try to render illegal a political party that has just run second in the general election without any significant allegations of voting irregularity and has gained 20 per cent of the entire popular vote would be an act of desperation and brinkmanship.

To an outside observer, it is not easily clear that there is any reason to consider that the Alternative is more prone to extremism than the Left, partly a detritus in part of the old communist regime of East Germany. Chancellor Merz deserves admiration for having retained his interest in public life after being pushed aside for nearly 20 years by former chancellor Angela Merkel, and after having effectively been vindicated with the policy options that he advocated, but which were passed over in favour of Merkel’s endless waffling, subservience to Russia, and truckling to ecological extremists. Unlike other long-serving Christian Democratic chancellors of the Federal Republic, Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Kohl, Angela Merkel cannot be considered a success. The new chancellor has walked a difficult tightrope on most of the key issues confronting Germany. He expresses support for climate change concerns but has long denounced the shuttering of the advanced German nuclear power program as a “grave strategic error.” He has hovered on the brink of categorising significant numbers of immigrants as “welfare tourists,” and has tried to court anti-immigration opinion while retaining the distinction between Christian Democrats and the more immigration-sceptical Alternative.

He has advocated strenuous assistance to Ukraine and a firmer and more united European stance against Putin’s Russia, and has floated schemes of assuring complete extension of Anglo-French nuclear deterrence to include the defence of Germany. Throughout his public career he has been emphatically pro-Israel and has promised to invite Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to Germany and to ignore the charges against him in the arch-leftist International Criminal Court, as Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán recently did. He has strongly supported the right of Israel to destroy the Hamas terrorist apparatus while expressing what are in practice in Europe, obligatory reservations about some of the conduct of Israeli defence forces in Gaza.

He declared himself to be a staunch European and a “convinced transatlanticist.” He has been seriously rattled by some of President Trump’s initiatives and was outspoken in his opposition to a number of reflections of vice president Vance at the European security conference in Munich in February. The American vice president criticized the Europeans generally and in particular cases Germany and the United Kingdom, for insufficient respect for the political rights of the Alternative for Germany, sluggishness in recognising the dangers of unregulated and disruptive immigration, and the suppression of rights of dissent in respect of abortion and other subjects. Merz was instrumental in the entirely desirable and necessary exemption of increased defence spending from the German prohibition against deficit financing. This is perfectly consistent with his call for Germany to rise from being a middle power to a “prominent middle power.”

The Alternative party leader Alice Weidel has made the point that the United States can have a fully compliant Germany following America’s lead in the Western Alliance with an underfunded defence capability, or a Germany fully pulling its weight in military matters but less reflexively prone to do as the Americans ask. Chancellor Merz has come somewhat close to a similar sentiment by saying that Europe must strengthen itself and be less reliant on the United States for the assurance of its security. These are subtle moves to accommodate the evolving geostrategic realities of Europe: Russia is not a serious threat to Western Europe. It has a GDP smaller than Canada’s and while it has a powerful nuclear military arsenal, Anglo-French nuclear deterrence is thoroughly adequate, and Russia’s conventional military capacity has been exposed in Ukraine as very unimpressive. Its only capacity for influencing the global correlation of forces is to deliver its natural resources to China which would transform Russia into a client state of Beijing largely financed by royalties for resource extraction from Siberia by the Chinese. As Russia is not really a threat to Western Europe but China is attempting to be a rival to the United States, and Europe has practically no strategic presence in the Far East, it is natural that the United States is focused on the Pacific and expects Europe to manage its relations with Russia on its own, though within the framework of a continuing but modified Western Alliance. Merz appears to have some grasp of this and is very critical of China.

All of this can be worked out and the new German chancellor seems to be perceptive and diplomatically effective. But he is operating within tight parameters in evolving German politics. It will now be the supreme test of his political career to demonstrate his ability to turn the political centre of Germany which has moved slightly to the Right, into a position of strength, pushing the Alternative and the Left to the fringes, or whether the Christian Democrats will follow the Social Democrats in losing strength to both the Left and the Right.

Germany has not acted responsibly in its role as the greatest power in Europe since the Emperor Wilhelm II fired Bismarck as Chancellor in 1890. Wilhelm allowed the Russian alliance to collapse, provoked the British by an aggressive naval construction program, and effectively created the Triple Entente of the United Kingdom, France, and Russia, and blundered into the catastrophe of World War I. The Weimar Republic was responsible but meek and gave way to the unspeakable horrors of the Third Reich. After 1945 every square millimeter of Germany was occupied by its former enemies and West Germany and the reunited Federal Republic have behaved with exemplary responsibility but a tentativeness that is understandable given modern German history. Europe and the world are waiting for Germany to grow into its full responsibilities while retaining its unbroken postwar dedication to democracy and international law. If Friedrich Merz achieves this goal, he will join the illustrious company of Bismarck, Adenauer, and Kohl as a great German chancellor.