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Friedrich Merz, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and Alice Weidel
Can Friedrich Merz be the leader Germany – and Europe – needs?
As expected, Friedrich Merz is set to become the next German chancellor after his conservative Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) won one of the tightest and highest-turnout elections in the country’s postwar history.
But the 28.5% earned by Merz’s CDU/CSU was the party’s second-lowest tally ever – hardly a mandate. Not to be outdone, outgoing Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s center-left Social Democrats (SPD) came third with just 16.4% – their worst defeat in 137 years. The moderate Greens led by economy minister Robert Habeck lost ground, too, scoring a disappointing 12.5%.
By contrast, extremist parties had a great night on Sunday. The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) came in second place, doubling its vote share since the 2021 elections to 20.8% on the back of large gains with previous nonvoters, in the poorest districts, and across eastern Germany. The former communist Left Party (Die Linke), meanwhile, secured 8.8% of the vote by mobilizing younger women.
Neither the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) nor the far-left Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) were able to clear the 5% threshold needed to enter parliament, increasing the number of seats allocated to the larger parties. The CDU/CSU and SPD’s combined allocation of 328 of 630 seats in the Bundestag will allow Merz to form a two-way coalition with the Social Democrats, avoiding the worst-case scenario of a weak, unwieldy, and unstable three-party coalition like Scholz’s ill-fated government with the Greens and the FDP (before it collapsed).
Though the CDU/CSU and SPD have real differences on immigration, social spending, and taxation, and their presumptive 13-seat majority won’t be large, so-called “grand coalitions” between these rival establishment parties have a long history in Germany and are popular with voters for their track record of delivering moderation and stability. Merz’s predecessor as party leader, former Chancellor Angela Merkel, presided over three of them.
But the inevitable alliance this time around is a flashing warning sign of Germans’ fading patience with the political center – and, conversely, of their growing appetite for radical movements – in a fragmented party landscape. The AfD won enough seats to make a two-way coalition with the CDU/CSU mathematically possible, but it is considered a neo-Nazi party by the entire German political establishment. Merz has made it clear that, despite his flirtation with them over migration and the recent embrace by Elon Musk and US Vice President JD Vance, the “firewall” keeping the extremists out of power will continue to hold – for now at least.
Yet as mainstream parties continue to lose voters to the far right, they will be increasingly forced into forming ever weaker and more ineffective coalitions just to stay in power. Alice Weidel, the AfD’s leader, has set her sights on the 2029 elections, hoping that the AfD can capitalize on – and nudge – the failure of yet another disappointing centrist government to become Germany’s strongest party and kingmaker. Over the next four years, it will aim to use its much-strengthened position to dominate agenda-setting and sabotage the new government as much as possible.
One weapon the AfD may be able to wield to hamstring Merz’s coalition is the so-called “blocking minority” it’ll form with the hard-left Die Linke, given the radical parties’ combined 216 Bundestag seats – just above the 210 seats needed to thwart constitutional reforms like the loosening of Germany’s strict fiscal rules (aka “debt brake”), which require a two-thirds majority in both houses of parliament.
Created in 2009 to restrict deficits, the constitutionally enshrined debt brake has since limited Berlin’s ability to borrow money to finance public spending. But 2025 is not 2009. Europe’s largest economy is in the midst of a profound economic crisis at a time of unprecedented geopolitical upheaval. Berlin needs to unlock hundreds of billions of dollars to modernize the country’s infrastructure, lower energy costs, invest in innovation, revive its stalled economy, ramp up support for Ukraine, and bolster its defense capabilities. The scale of the challenge has been compounded by President Donald Trump’s recent pivot toward Russia and threat to abandon Europe as the war in Ukraine turns three years old.
Merz struck the right level of urgency when he said that his “absolute priority” as chancellor will be “to strengthen Europe” in order “to achieve independence” from the United States, given that the Trump administration seems to be “largely indifferent” to Europe’s fate. A staunch transatlanticist before Washington started behaving like an adversary, Merz understands that what’s at stake is not just German interests but Europe’s future.
But Germany’s incoming chancellor has his work cut out for him. The AfD will obstruct all attempts to revamp the debt brake and raise borrowing, while the anti-militarist Die Linke supports reforming the borrowing rules but has explicitly vowed to oppose any vote to increase the country’s defense spending on principle. With a blocking minority in the Bundestag, these fringe parties could seriously undermine Merz’s agenda and, by extension, European security.
Merz’s plan to circumvent that challenge is the kind of boldness Germany needs more of. Instead of waiting for the blocking minority to be seated, the soon-to-be chancellor is exploring the possibility of pushing the defense spending hike through the lame-duck parliament, where mainstream parties will technically have a two-thirds supermajority until the newly elected parliament is sworn in on Mar. 25. The fiscally conservative Merz ruled out using this gimmick to reform the debt brake outright yesterday, but he’s reportedly in talks with the Social Democrats and the Greens to set up a special off-budget defense fund worth around 200 billion euros (this would also require a two-thirds majority).
Admittedly, four weeks is very little time to negotiate a workaround while juggling tricky coalition talks in a country that’s notoriously averse to big, fast changes. But extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures. If the German political establishment can’t muster the courage to act decisively now, it may not just be the AfD knocking on their doors in four years – Russian troops could be knocking at Europe’s doorstep, too.
Germany's close election limits its ability to lead Europe
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Lots going on the German elections. Probably the most important though, everything around Europe and Russia and Ukraine and the United States kind of dominating the headlines right now. Germany went pretty much the way we all expected. The polls have been very, very steady over the course of the past couple of months. The big question was whether or not you could have a two-party or a three-party coalition that really depended on whether or not parties that were small would get over the 5% hurdle that allows them representation in Germany's parliament, in which case it would be harder to put together a government. You'd need three parties or whether they would stay out. The latter turned out to be the case. Didn't find that out until three A.M. in Germany. Very unusual how close in that regard the election was for those smaller parties, and that means you're going to get a grand coalition, a two-party coalition center-right and center-left.
They don't agree on a lot of policies. It is hard to get good outcomes politically from that kind of a coalition, but it's not unusual in Germany. The other big news, the Alternative für Deutschland performing about as well as they were expected to over the course of the past couple months, they came in a solid second. They won across former East Germany and they got single digits across former West Germany. But that's better than they performed last time around, even though their popularity has been high for a while now, certainly if you think about their trajectory over the some 12 years since they were founded, this is now a party that has a solid shot of being number one in 2029 next German elections, especially if the Germans are unable to turn their economy around. Though on migration, most of the German political spectrum has aligned with where AfD, more or less is just as we've seen across many countries in Europe, like in Italy and in the UK and France and elsewhere.
Okay. So that's the near-term outcome. Still a grand coalition is going to have a hard time spending a huge amount of money on defense or on Ukraine aid or on German growth. And there is some urgency in seeing if you can at least pass more German defense spending outside of their hard fast debt break while the present Scholz-led three-party coalition is in place. Why? Because there is a constitutional majority blocking capacity among the hard left and hard right parties, Die Linke and the AfD in Germany, which means that unless you get one of them on your side, you're not going to be able to do that spending. So the big takeaway here is Germany is probably going to have a really hard time really stepping up as a leader on doing far more in Europe for Europe than even you've seen under Scholz. It's going to be a more powerful government, but not the kind of power that they really need.
So here's a situation where Friedrich Merz, who will be the next German chancellor coming out immediately and saying that they can no longer count on the United States, that even NATO's existence as we look forward to the June NATO summit is open to question that Germany and Europe are going to have to have European defense without the United States, independent of the US claiming that American intervention in Germany's election in favor of the AfD considered by the other German parties to be a neo-Nazi party is as striking and dangerous in intervention and unacceptable as Moscow interventions into Germany's democracy. In other words, the German leadership, the next German chancellor, understanding that the US is an ally, believes that Trump and his administration is an adversary, is an enemy. And that is a truly shocking thing to hear from the incoming German government. Having said all of that, saying it is one thing, taking action to ensure that the Europeans are capable of defending themselves is quite another, and they're nowhere remotely close to that.
Macron in the United States today will be meeting with Trump shortly, meeting with him by himself. Kier Starmer from the UK later this week, same. Are their positions coordinated? More than they have been. But can they do enough? Can they put enough on the table in terms of financing, in terms of boots on the ground in Ukraine absent an American backstop? No, they can't. And I think as a consequence, the baseline expectation is that the US effort at rapprochement with Putin is going ahead. That the US effort of cutting a deal with Putin on Ukraine over the heads of the Ukrainians and the Europeans is largely going ahead. And this of course bodes very badly for the future of Ukraine and Zelensky, but also really does undermine the existence, the strength of NATO as the world's most important collective security agreement. I don't see Trump as wanting to end all military cooperation in Europe.
He just met with the Polish president. It was a very short meeting, supposed to be an hour was 10 minutes. But the important thing for the Poles was announced, which is the US is still committed to maintaining American troops on the ground in Poland. Why? Because Poland is not only very friendly to the US, but it's also moving towards 5% of GDP spend on defense in this year. And it's also said that they're not sending any troops to Ukraine in a post-ceasefire environment. Why not? Well, number one, because they need troops on the ground in Poland. But number two, because the Russians have said that they won't accept any European troops, and right now that's Trump's position. So Poland doesn't want to undermine their important defense protector, the Americans and President Trump. All of this is to say that there's probably going to be more division inside Europe as a consequence of these policies that Trump is putting forward. It's going to be very hard for him to maintain strong unity of Europe, even as they are facing more existential challenges economically in terms of their competitiveness, their growth, and most importantly in terms of their national security. So that's where we are right now. Enormous amount of news coming down the pike this week. Haven't even talked about the latest on Israel and Gaza and China and everything else. But if this is the big news, might as well cover it. Talk to you all real soon.
German conservative CDU candidate for chancellor Friedrich Merz attends a campaign event in Vechta, Germany, on Feb. 19, 2025.
Election-eve shifts in Germany?
A poll of polls published by Politico.eu finds that support for the center-right CDU/CSU has fallen three points in the past three months, from 32% to 29%, while backing for the far-right Alternative for Germany, or Afd, party has risen three points over that period, from 18% to 21%. Support for the incumbent center-left SPD has been stuck near 16% for the past year.
What might change minds or help the undecided decide? According to that YouGov survey, about 27% of Germans get at least some of their political news from social media sites like X, Facebook, Instagram, and others. But that number jumps to 40% among AfD supporters and 43% for backers of the far-left party known as The Left.
The CDU/CSU is very likely to win, making Friedrich Merz the country’s new chancellor. But he’s likely to lead a coalition government with a weak mandate, in part because he has vowed to reject any cooperation with the AfD. The likeliest outcome appears to be a grand coalition between the center-right and the center-left SPD, but an 11th-hour surge in support for the AfD could force Merz to include smaller parties in his coalition.Friedrich Merz
Talk vs. tariffs: Two strategies to tackle Donald Trump
As US President-elect Donald Trump prepares to return to the White House, leaders in the world’s two largest trading blocs — China and the EU — are revealing their starkly different strategies for dealing with his “America First” trade policies.
In Europe, Friedrich Merz, the German opposition leader and leading contender for chancellor in next month’s national elections, is advocating for the negotiation ofan EU–US free trade agreement. Instead of retaliatory tariffs, Merz argues the EU should reignite its competitiveness, starting with lower taxes, and then tell the Americans: “Yes, we are prepared to face this competition with you, too.”
“This competition,” of course, includes China, which is taking a polar opposite approach anddoubling down on its trade war with the US. This week, Beijing added 28 American defense-related companies, including Raytheon, Boeing Defense, and Lockheed Martin, to its export control list, effectively banning exports of dual-use items. The move coincides with a ban on rare earth minerals to the US to “safeguard national security and interests.”
What both Bonn and Beijing agree on, however, is the need to act before Trump takes office — and in Merz’s case, before he does as well. We’ll be watching for the follow-through — and whether talk or tariffs proves the more successful strategy.