Germany’s chancellor-presumptive has come out swinging against the United States administration of Donald Trump, hours after winning Sunday’s federal election.
“After [President] Donald Trump’s remarks last week … it is clear that this government does not care much about the fate of Europe,” said Friedrich Merz, leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), in a televised discussion on election night. He called for German “independence” from the US.
On February 18, Trump called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a “modestly successful comedian”, who had become “a dictator without elections” who had “done a terrible job”.
It was a dramatic reversal from the tight bond Zelenskyy had enjoyed with Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden. Zelenskyy offered to resign on Sunday if Ukraine gained immediate NATO membership.
A week earlier, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stunned European leaders when he told them they “must provide the overwhelming share of future lethal and nonlethal aid to Ukraine”, and take the lead in protecting their continent from Russia by spending 5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) on defence, up from 2 percent today.
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It was uncertain “whether we will still be talking about NATO in its current form” at the next NATO summit in June, Merz said, “or whether we will have to establish a European defence capability much more quickly”.
In a news conference on Monday, Merz told reporters, “it is five minutes to midnight for Europe” on defence.
His bold rhetoric is at odds with the weak hand voters gave him.
The CDU’s 28.6 percent of Sunday’s vote is its lowest margin of victory since the party was founded in 1949.
Merz thinks the US is ‘throwing Ukraine to the wolves’
Merz is in accelerated talks to form a centrist “grand coalition” with the Social Democratic Party (SPD), which was ousted from office.
His CDU, along with the Christian Social Union (CSU), could rule with 360 members in the 630-seat Bundestag, the German parliament. But they would have to iron out their differences on foreign policy, defence and the economic policy that underpins them.
SPD leader Olaf Scholz has staunchly refused to deliver 500km-range (310-mile) Taurus missiles to Ukraine. Merz said last October that he would do it if Russia refused to stop attacking Ukrainian civilians. Moscow consistently denies targeting civilians in its war in Ukraine.
“Merz clearly thinks the US is throwing Ukraine to the wolves and providing weaponry for Ukraine would strengthen its hand,” Timothy Less, senior adviser for geopolitics at Cambridge University’s Centre for Risk Studies, told Al Jazeera. “But doing so will be complicated. German society is divided on the question of military support for Ukraine and so is the SPD.”
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“Once the EU public grasps the staggering financial cost of propping up Ukraine’s war effort and the long-term danger of pushing Russia into tighter alliances with China, North Korea, and Iran, they’ll demand the war ends,” Demetries Grimes, a former naval commander and US attache to Greece and Israel, told Al Jazeera.
Merz and Scholz agree on the need to make the German manufacturing industry more competitive by providing cheaper energy, but the CDU leader wants to reactivate three nuclear power plants decommissioned by the Scholz government.
Merz also wants to slash the welfare state, which lies at the heart of the SPD’s economic policy.
“It is a big mistake to pay for not working, and to give others not the best incentives to come back to the labour market,” he told the World Economic Forum (WEF) at Davos last month.
Among their biggest disagreements has been Germany’s constitutional deficit ceiling of 0.35 percent of GDP. It was one of the reasons why it took Scholz three years to raise defence spending to 2 percent of GDP. Both leaders have baulked at raising it to 5 percent.
“Without real budget muscle behind it, Merz’s rhetoric is just noise,” said Grimes.
Scholz now supports creating “a smart and targeted change of the debt rule,” arguing that Germany’s low debt of 62 percent of GDP gives it room to borrow.
Merz, who has been a dedicated defender of the deficit ceiling, said in November he could consider changing it, but not for the kind of welfare spending of which Social Democrats are so fond.
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Perhaps the pair’s biggest disagreement is on immigration.
“We will immediately stop that part of migration that comes from family reunification,” Merz told the WEF. “There are 500,000 [people] who came to Germany in the last four years without any control. This has to be stopped immediately.”
As opposition leader, Merz invited the SPD to support that measure on January 29.
When they refused, he shocked them by inviting support from any quarter, including the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). “I can’t trust him any more,” Scholz said after the vote.
United in adversity
Two factors may be bringing Merz and Scholz closer together, however. One is the surge in support for the AfD, which took 20.8 percent of the vote, twice its 2021 showing, by eating away at both the CDU and the SPD, partly on migration.
The two centrist parties have decided not to work with the far right.
The other is the turnaround in the US support of Europe’s defence, which Less called “a game-changer” as the US could now pull 35,000 soldiers stationed in Germany.
“I take Merz’s comments on independence from the US as a serious statement about his and Germany’s support for a stronger Europe,” Less said. “The American security guarantee is no longer guaranteed, so the main reason for opposing an alternative to NATO is falling away.”
Can it be done? European defence autonomy could be a likelier proposition if Germany and France work together to include the United Kingdom in a supra-EU European defence coalition.
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Others are less convinced.
“Europe stepping up its defence game wouldn’t weaken NATO; it would strengthen the alliance, boost transatlantic ties, and improve cooperation,” said Grimes.
“The real issue isn’t autonomy for its own sake – it’s about boosting deterrence,” he said. “Enhanced European capabilities can only reinforce, not replace, that longstanding umbrella.”
Greater defence spending “will come at a price because the more autonomous the Europeans are in terms of security, the more autonomous they will be politically, allowing them, for example, to draw closer to China”, he added, “something that runs contrary to the US’ strategic interests”.
