On the face of it, the likely next German government will look familiar to observers. For the fourth time over the past 20 years, the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and Social Democrats (SPD), the two dominant forces of post-1949 German democratic history, will form a coalition that will be led by Friedrich Merz (CDU), the winner of the election on 23 February.
But there is nothing familiar about the context in which the leaders of the two parties are negotiating an agreement on a new government. The U.S. government, led by Donald Trump, is taking the wrecking ball to European and global order that it helped build after 1945. Generations of German foreign policy makers have self-identified as “Atlanticists” (Transatlantiker), arguing for a close partnership with the US. The incoming chancellor Merz has been a staunch Atlanticist for his whole career, even at one point heading “Atlantik-Brücke,” an elite network with the purpose of “anchoring Germany” in the partnership with the US. Therefore Merz’ statements on election night responding to the Trump administration’s trashing of the transatlantic alliance and its turn against liberal democracy in Europe carry a lot of weight: “My absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA.” Merz said that the Trump administration seemed “largely indifferent to the fate of Europe.” He said it was unclear whether by the time of the NATO summit in June “we will still be talking about NATO in its current form or whether we will have to establish an independent European defense capability much more quickly.”
Of course, Germans have only themselves to blame for the lack of investment in their own defense capabilities in the face of an imperialist Russia waging war against Ukraine enabled by Beijing. U.S. President Barack Obama’s Secretary of Defense Robert Gates had warned Europeans already in 2011 about the “blunt reality” of a “dwindling appetite” on the part of US “body politic” to “expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense.” Even the shock of Trump’s first term was not enough to decisively change Germany’s posture. The then German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared at the beginning of Trump’s first term in 2017 that “we Europeans truly have to take our fate into our own hands.” But no serious action to this end followed. The return of the transatlantic grandfather Joe Biden to the White House lulled Germans in a false sense of a return to the status quo ante. It is only now, with Trump’s destruction of the West during the first month of his second term that Germans are waking up to the monumental consequences that follow from “taking our fate into our own hands” seriously.
