Just a handful of days shy of a federal election, a dark mood has engulfed Germany. The country has entered its third year of recession. Global events have put paid to the old cliché that stability and success depend on “security from America, gas from Russia, and exports to China”. The extreme-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party has established itself as the country’s second largest. And Germany’s politics itself – once a ballast of compromise-driven conciliation and centrist good sense – has assumed an unusual tenor of malice and recrimination, between the individual leaders, between the parties, and indeed between Berlin and the federal states.
For Germany’s European partners, the situation is deeply worrying. To be sure, the AfD is not poised to take power on 23 February – or even to come anywhere close to it. The more immediate problem rather is the resolutely internal orientation that German politics has acquired, and this at a moment when Europe is demanding cohesion, strategy and leadership from Berlin.
Surveying the current global climate, one might expect the spectres of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and China to be haunting the present election at every turn. But, strangely, this is not the case. More than anything, in fact, the grim situation at home has transmuted foreign policy issues into domestic ones.
While not a majority, a sizeable chunk of the German population rejects support for Ukraine out of hand.
A prehistory of this demoralising situation was evident back in November, as Chancellor Olaf Scholz witnessed his Social Democrat–Green–Liberal coalition collapse around him. In his explanation of the policy rifts that had triggered his government’s premature end, he summoned the fiscal credibility of a proposal to send several billion additional Euros of aid to Ukraine – as if a binary choice existed between supporting Kyiv or funding pensions at home. It is a position he has maintained. Scholz’s pseudo-populist effort to recast Ukraine support as a bread-and-butter domestic budget issue is not an edifying sight. But it nevertheless tells us much about the inward turn of German politics.
While not a majority, a sizeable chunk of the German population rejects support for Ukraine out of hand. One group – most closely affiliated with the AfD – derives its position from a visible admiration of Putin: a veneration sometimes embedded in a much deeper historical German affinity for Russia and its promise of an anti-western civilisational ideal. Another, more closely associated with the left–right populist upstart Bündnis Sarah Wagenknecht party, but also with long tendrils in Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) itself, draws upon a longer tradition of pacifism and Realpolitik conciliation – its mascot being SPD’s Chancellor Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik of the early 1970s.
These fissures in German society help explain the delicate, and ultimately doomed, tripartite strategy Scholz adopted on Ukraine. The first was the much-touted Zeitenwende (“Historic Turning Point”), in which Germany would break with its traditional restraint and bolster its defence capacities. But second, he sought to appease the pacifist segment of the German electorate (and not least of his own party) by positioning himself as Friedenskanzler (“Peace Chancellor”) – stressing Germany’s leading role in providing financial assistance to Ukraine while remaining firm on his government’s unwillingness to contribute to any possible “escalation” of the conflict. And third, Scholz deferred most major strategic decision-making to Washington, justifying his own actions by reference to those of Joe Biden.
None of these pillars remains standing. The Zeitenwende has become a totem of empty political big-talk. The Friedenskanzler posture led the SPD to a miserable result in last year’s European Parliament elections. And with Donald Trump supplanting Biden in the White House, strategic differences between Washington and Berlin have become fundamental.
By contrast, Scholz’s challenger and likely successor, Friedrich Merz of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), has set forth his resoluteness in supporting Ukraine as a critical point of contrast to the beleaguered current Chancellor. On foreign policy more generally, he has touted his experience chairing the Atlantic Bridge association as evidence of his commitment to the classic Atlanticism so beloved by his party and his previous career as a European MP as testimony of his unwavering Europeanism.
Should Merz emerge victorious next week, there are many in Europe who will welcome the change.
On paper, the probable new Chancellor might not offer a radical departure from the outlook of Scholz and his government (not least because the SPD may well remain in power, this time as Merz’s junior coalition partner). Indeed, during the campaign, both Scholz and Merz have made similar noises about “common European responses” to global challenges. This is promising: if Berlin’s summoning of “common European responses” once sounded idealistic – or, worse, like an obligatory diplomatic nod to Paris – today, it is little short of a necessity.
Should Merz emerge victorious next week, there are many in Europe who will welcome the change. Scholz for instance has left Germany’s relationships with France and Poland in a miserable state: a failing on which Merz has been only too happy to capitalise. But there are concerns about Merz, too. Witness his extraordinary recent gambit to shatter a decades-long taboo and accept AfD parliamentary support for a migration policy initiative. Not only did this “taboo-breach” inject a certain poison into Germany’s political atmosphere, Merz’s actions also pushed migration to the centre of the election, squeezing the critical spheres of economic management and foreign policy to the discursive margins.
Among Germany’s centrist parties, the lines of division on foreign policy do not run as deeply as those on migration. But even here, Merz’s actions ought to give some cause for concern. The issue is not simply that the likely new Chancellor is a political gambler with a propensity to surrender to his impulses; it is much larger than that. For, faced with a domestic political landscape in which the AfD is firmly lodged as the second-largest party, and in which trust between the mainstream, centrist parties has been eroded, whoever heads up the new government will struggle to reverse Germany’s inward turn. This will be a source of frustration in Paris, Warsaw and Brussels. But in Kyiv, it could be a source of tragedy.
