Mark Leonard
LONDON – May February 23, 2025, grow to be often known as Europe’s Independence Day? It would as effectively be if the winner of Germany’s election, Friedrich Merz, has his means.
It was hanging that Merz, the quintessential German Atlanticist and monetary hawk who many thought of hopelessly caught within the Eighties, ought to have fun his victory by knocking away one of many elementary pillars of German conservative politics since Konrad Adenauer, the nation’s first postwar chancellor. “My absolute precedence will likely be to strengthen Europe as rapidly as potential in order that, step-by-step, we will actually obtain independence from the united statesA.,” he mentioned in his first post-election interview.
Another leaders are nonetheless making an attempt to have their cake and eat it: speaking about defending Europe whereas working with america. Not Merz, who has launched what quantities to a full-frontal assault on Germany’s closest ally, even going as far as to accuse the US of election interference, on par with Russia.
Since Donald Trump’s return to the White Home, U.S.-Europe relations have been mired in a elementary paradox. On one hand, Europeans are attempting to exhibit to Trump that they’re prepared to do extra in alternate for U.S. safety ensures. However, the US whose safety they search is making an attempt to power a NATO ally to surrender its personal territory and urgent Ukraine to consent to its personal financial rape and plunder. Demanding {that a} determined, war-ravaged nation signal over half of its revenues from vital minerals and rare-earth metals in perpetuity is a shakedown that may make even a mob boss blush.
Maybe this is the reason Merz has gone the place angels concern to tread, insisting that Europe might want to discover a solution to transfer from whole dependence on the U.S. to some kind of independence.
At my suppose tank, the European Council on Overseas Relations, we’ve got launched a “European Safety Initiative” to discover what this would possibly appear like. Earlier than Trump’s election victory, we talked about how we will defend Europe with much less America. However Europeans are more and more questioning the way to defend themselves from America.
Merz appears to be clear-eyed about the truth that turning into the chief Europe wants doesn’t simply imply recasting Germany’s relationships with France and Poland, but additionally figuring out a totally totally different relationship with the UK. As soon as U.Ok. Prime Minister Keir Starmer returns from what’s going to absolutely be an intensely irritating first journey to Washington, he would possibly see issues this manner as effectively.
However, to have any likelihood of success, Merz may also have to beat the self-harm of German financial ultra-orthodoxy. Scrapping the constitutional “debt brake,” launched by his predecessor and occasion colleague, Angela Merkel, is critical not simply to allow Europe to rearm but additionally to finance urgently wanted funding in infrastructure, renewables, and digitalization.
Merz has been adamant that mainstream events in Europe must rethink their strategy to immigration. However he has been a lot much less clear about how to try this in a means that displays Europe’s demographic challenges. Finally, what is required is a set of insurance policies that re-establishes management over borders and inhabitants flows, limits the unfavourable affect of these flows on probably the most susceptible members of society, and concurrently considers the workforce mandatory for financial development, innovation, and public companies.
inexperienced coverage and the setting, the query for Germany and Europe will likely be the way to keep away from a zero-sum tradeoff between decreasing emissions and decreasing costs. The one reply is to create an environmental coverage which can also be an industrial coverage.
However how? A elementary query behind all these points, from immigration and the inexperienced transition to commerce and protection, is the way to make interdependence much less dangerous. How do you give individuals who have been left behind the sense that the federal government will hold them secure in a harmful world, with out walling ourselves off?
The independence Merz is promising will power Europe to rethink lots of its relationships, together with with China, Israel, India, and, after all, the U.S. And we’ll want a political class that is ready to see issues clearly and make radical adjustments. Merz won’t be alone in main Germany to a brand new consensus. He’ll nearly definitely want to steer a coalition with the Social Democrats (SPD), which can truly assist him to carry his occasion to a unique place – particularly on the debt brake. Germany’s coalitions have typically been a supply of presidency weak point, however on this case a grand coalition of the principle center-right and center-left events may very well be a supply of power.
Merz is an unlikely candidate for this shift. His important critique of Merkel after they had been each vying for the Christian Democratic Union’s management was that she had strayed dangerously removed from CDU orthodoxy. However simply because it took an SPD chancellor, the outgoing Olaf Scholz, to start out growing protection funding and reduce the nation’s ties with Russia, Merz, the über-Atlanticist and monetary conservative, could be the one German politician who can credibly bury the debt brake and pave the way in which for a really impartial Europe.
Mark Leonard, Director of the European Council on Overseas Relations, is the creator of “The Age of Unpeace: How Connectivity Causes Battle” (Bantam Press, 2021). This text was distributed by Mission Syndicate.
