Friedrich Merz’s long and winding journey towards the German chancellery is a tale of the federal republic’s past and present. Marinated in the determinedly pro-European, pro-Western politics of Helmut Kohl’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in the 1990s, he became co-leader of its Bundestag group in 2000, before Angela Merkel elbowed him aside. But Merz’s outspoken conservatism also clearly chimes with the harsher, more doubtful and sometimes more inward-looking mood of mid-2020s Germany.

This is one reason why the CDU is polling around 30% to 34% ahead of the federal election on 23 February. The election result is far from certain—these are volatile political times, and Merz is relatively untested—but his victory would align with the broader German zeitgeist.

Understand that, and one starts to understand the nuances of Merz’s foreign-policy philosophy, as well as what a CDU win would mean for Germany’s international role. It also sheds some light on the most important issue: whether the election result will see Europe’s keystone country provide more leadership in the coming years than it has in recent ones.

Germany’s now-collapsed “traffic light” coalition—Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD), the centre-left Greens, and the right-liberal Free Democrats (FDP)—framed European and German interests as tightly interlocking, but often acted otherwise. An unpredictable actor in Brussels, it would often abstain or change its mind at the last minute. It delayed the European Union’s adoption of sanctions against Russia, reflexively rejected Mario Draghi’s report on the single market’s competitiveness, and opposed tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles. Berlin’s relations with Paris and Warsaw have deteriorated.

In other European capitals, policymakers often remark that Germany appears to have gone missing[1]. The country that—under Kohl and, in her better moments, Merkel—rowed Europe through its storms now seems to be swept along by the current of events. Whether Merz can change this depends on the interaction between the three main pillars of his foreign policy—and the complementarities and tensions between them.

***

The first is a profound commitment to a more integrated Europe. Merz came up in the Kohl era; the age of German reunification and the Maastricht Treaty. A member of the European Parliament from 1989 to 1994, he sat on the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs, which helped mould the single market. Merz has called Wolfgang Schäuble “the closest friend and adviser I ever had in politics”, and seems especially influenced by his mentor’s belief in a Europe of concentric circles centered on France and Germany. In 2018, Merz echoed this sentiment in a call jointly authored with the philosopher Jürgen Habermas for a European army, “European rather than national terms when setting wages and prices”, and even a European unemployment insurance scheme.

Today Merz calls for a grand reset in Germany’s relations with France and Poland, chides Europeans for being too reliant on American support for Ukraine, and blasts Scholz for refusing to provide Kyiv with Taurus cruise missiles. In what will likely be a major dividing line in the upcoming campaign, Merz has upbraided the would-be Friedenskanzler, or “peace chancellor”, with the words: “Peace you can find in any cemetery. It is our freedom that we must defend.”

This European Merz was most visible at an event in Berlin with Enrico Letta, the Italian former prime minister and author of a bold blueprint for a deeper single market, on the day after the US presidential election. As the reality of a new Donald Trump term settled over the German capital, the German conservative and the Italian social democrat found far-reaching common ground on the need to integrate European energy, telecommunications, defence and capital markets.

***

The second pillar of the Merz doctrine is a market-liberal Atlanticism that goes beyond the “Westbindung”, the federal republic’s almost existentially Western geopolitical identity. Merz has a deeper personal connection with the US and the Anglosphere than Konrad Adenauer, Helmut Kohl, or either Merkel or Schäuble. After he was sidelined by Merkel in the early 2000s, he pursued a transatlantic business career; heading the German board of the asset manager Blackrock and serving as chairman of Atlantik-Brücke, a campaign for closer US-German relations. Merz also has an affinity with the United Kingdom, chiding Merkel for not doing enough to stop Brexit. He speaks almost accentless English.

But realism tempers his emotional connection with the English-speaking world. Merz is rare in Germany as presenting Trump’s re-election as a justification for transatlantic engagement: at the Letta event he argued that the failed EU-US free trade deal (TTIP) would have helped insulate Europe’s economy from looming American tariffs, and that EU should not necessarily respond to those tit-for-tat. But he also acknowledges that Joe Biden was America’s last traditionally Atlanticist president. He has publicly asserted that the “Europe of yesterday”, with its “confidence associated with the solitary leadership of the US”, is a thing of the past. And he recognises that the transatlantic relationship must change radically to survive, with a more balanced burden of responsibility.

***

Such Europeanism (albeit conservative) and Atlanticism (albeit realistic) might make Merz seem a throwback to Kohl-era Germany. But the third pillar of ‘Merzianism’ complicates that picture: as well as being a product of the idealistic 1990s, he is also a creature of the more introspective and less exceptionalist Germany of the 2020s. In his own distinct way, the CDU chancellor candidate is prone to just as defensive and narrow a conception of the German national interest as that which has marked Scholz’s Europe policies at their most parochial.

Merz has described Ukrainian refugees in Germany as “social tourists”. On Berlin’s temporary imposition of border controls, a main cause of its current poor relations with Warsaw, he only wishes Scholz’s government had acted sooner. He has a cool relationship with his CDU party comrade Ursula von der Leyen, having disagreed with the European Commission president on the EU’s migration and asylum pact; on EU tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles; and its 2035 target to end the sale of new polluting cars.

Most of all, this “Germany first” approach comes across in Merz’s steely refusal to countenance the measures required for Europe to fund a more sovereign future. When Draghi published his competitiveness report, the CDU chancellor candidate dismissed common borrowing as “a debt spiral” that he would “do everything to prevent”. He has made it clear that the Next Generation EU pandemic recovery fund was an exception, rather than a basis for future common borrowing for shared priorities like defence. These positions are striking not in their divergence from Scholz’s traffic-light coalition, but in their continuity with it.

***

Combine those three pillars—Europeanism, Atlanticism, and “Germany first”—and the broad contours of a Merz chancellorship become clear. It would be most active where the three overlap; for example, European initiatives to placate Trump in the interests of German business (especially to curb American tariffs).

A Merz government would shy away from proclamations of European “autonomy” and seek to shore up NATO, while urging greater European leadership within the alliance. It would be more robust than its predecessor on Ukraine and Russia; with Merz confident in personally associating himself with the Bundeswehr and German defence. It would seek to relaunch Germany’s place in Europe, focusing especially on France and Poland but also the Nordics and Baltics. Yet it would also bridle at putting serious German money behind this European reset. On China, it would be torn between an instinctive geopolitical hawkishness and a business-friendly inclination to hedge German bets.

Viewing the Merz doctrine as the fusion of those three pillars also highlights some inherent tensions. Where, during the Kohl years, Europeanism and Atlanticism mostly fitted neatly together, under a second Trump term Merz’s stated desire to do German “deals” with the incoming president may well clash with any Schäublerian quest for a more robust and united European core.

Meanwhile the conflict between the narrowly German sense of Merz’s mission and his European calling is expressed in his reluctance to countenance deeper European fiscal integration or a genuinely shared migration regime. And in the age of Trump 2.0, there are also tensions between the Atlanticist pillar and “Germany first”. The more nationalist branches of the CDU in eastern states like Saxony are significant parts of Merz’s base and tend to be relatively more sceptical about NATO and Germany’s alignment with America.

***

Quite how these tensions play out depends a lot on the details of Germany’s federal election. One important factor is whether the overall campaign, which will reach its crescendo in first weeks of the new Trump administration, favours a united European stance or bilateral German attempts to seek special deals with the incoming president. Another concerns the result. The better the Eurosceptic, anti-NATO fringe parties—the far-right Alternative for Germany and the left-conservative Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance—do at the polls, the more Merz’s commitments to Europe and the US will come under pressure, including from within his own party.

Another significant variable is the influence of Merz’s inner circle of advisers. Key names if he becomes chancellor could include Thorsten Frei (a tough-on-migration CDU MP poised to run the chancellery), Jacob Schrot (Merz’s chief of staff and a keen Atlanticist), and Daniel Andrä (a foreign policy adviser with close links to the Bundeswehr). Merz’s team reflects his own instincts. But especially when those instincts are in tension, such voices could shape which of them prevail.

The biggest variable, however, is what sort of coalition emerges from the election. It is likely (at the time of writing) that the CDU/CSU will have to rely on a coalition with the SPD and/or the Greens. The latter are somewhat closer to Merz on Ukraine but farther from him on the climate and migration. More important than the exact makeup of the coalition, however, is whether it has the vision and cohesion to rise to Germany’s manifold challenges.

The country’s old model of “cheap energy from Russia, trade orders from China, security from the US” no longer works. Scholz’s government has slowly, fitfully edged Germany on from it, while too-often neglecting necessary European solutions. But the new Trump presidency greatly increases the urgency. Whether any Merz-led coalition has the internal and external political room to act accordingly will be decisive. So, too, will be whether it sees Europe more as an obstacle to that action, or a vessel for it.

[1] Authors’ conversations with policymakers in numerous European capitals, 2022-2024