Friedrich Merz, Germany’s European Vision, and the Constraints of German Coalition Politics

Jeff Rathke

President of AGI

Jeffrey Rathke is the President of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies at the Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC.

Prior to joining AICGS, Jeff was a senior fellow and deputy director of the Europe Program at CSIS, where his work focused on transatlantic relations and U.S. security and defense policy. Jeff joined CSIS in 2015 from the State Department, after a 24-year career as a Foreign Service Officer, dedicated primarily to U.S. relations with Europe. He was director of the State Department Press Office from 2014 to 2015, briefing the State Department press corps and managing the Department's engagement with U.S. print and electronic media. Jeff led the political section of the U.S. Embassy in Kuala Lumpur from 2011 to 2014. Prior to that, he was deputy chief of staff to the NATO Secretary General in Brussels. He also served in Berlin as minister-counselor for political affairs (2006–2009), his second tour of duty in Germany. His Washington assignments have included deputy director of the Office of European Security and Political Affairs and duty officer in the White House Situation Room and State Department Operations Center.

Mr. Rathke was a Weinberg Fellow at Princeton University (2003–2004), winning the Master’s in Public Policy Prize. He also served at U.S. Embassies in Dublin, Moscow, and Riga, which he helped open after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Mr. Rathke has been awarded national honors by Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, as well as several State Department awards. He holds an M.P.P. degree from Princeton University and B.A. and B.S. degrees from Cornell University. He speaks German, Russian, and Latvian.

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jrathke@aicgs.org

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has been having quite a run. His chancellorship stumbled briefly out of the gate, with a second round of voting necessary in the Bundestag on May 6 to elect him as chancellor. Travel in rapid succession to France, Poland, Brussels (EU and NATO), Ukraine, Italy, Lithuania, and Finland, along with visits by international leaders to Berlin began to give shape to Merz’s campaign promise to restore German relations with its European partners and to advance what he has called a “new spirit of unity” in Europe in the face of more challenging international circumstances. This policy is deeply embedded in the coalition agreement between Merz’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU), and the Social Democratic Party (SPD). SPD Chairman Lars Klingbeil and SPD Defense Minister Boris Pistorius (Germany’s most popular political figure) represent this tougher, more European German policy to meet the threats from Russia to Ukraine and the entire European political-security order.

Chancellor Merz visited Washington on June 5, capping his first month in office with a bilateral meeting with U.S. President Trump that was widely praised for establishing a positive working relationship with his American counterpart. The two leaders’ encounter with the press in the Oval Office—which has become an element of high-stakes political theater during Trump’s second term—went off with barely a hitch for the German-American relationship. There were no breakthroughs on thorny issues such as transatlantic trade or the Russian war in Ukraine, but the chancellor had the opportunity to highlight German positions (such as support for Ukraine and growing German defense spending) and embed them in a larger objective of U.S.-German collaboration. President Trump even endorsed keeping U.S. troops in Germany, which he threatened to withdraw during his first term during a disagreement with then-Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Friedrich Merz was able to return to Germany with a sense of achievement in shoring up one of the country’s most crucial—and increasingly unpredictable—relationships. This positioned Germany well ahead of the June 15-17 G7 Summit in Canada and the June 24-26 NATO Summit in the Hague.

The chancellor’s coalition politics have dragged his government back to earth this week, with the release on June 11 of a “manifesto” by a group of over 100 Social Democratic figures, including the SPD Caucus leader in the previous Bundestag Rolf Mützenich and prominent foreign policy figure Ralf Stegner. The document amounts to an attack on the SPD’s coalition agreement with the CDU/CSU. Calling for talks with Russia, the authors also reject Germany’s massive investments in the Bundeswehr and agreements made by former Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) on the future stationing of U.S. conventionally armed cruise missiles in Germany while the country strengthens its own precision strike capabilities. “Alarmist military rhetoric and gigantic armaments programs do not create more security for Germany and Europe but instead lead to destabilization a stronger reciprocal threat perception between NATO and Russia,” the authors write. Their rejection of Germany’s policy of rebuilding the European conventional deterrent stands in direct contradiction to decisions made by the SPD in 2023, when the party ruled out the normalization of relations with Russia “as long as Russia pursues its imperialist goal of conquering and suppressing sovereign states.” This was a dramatic change of the SPD’s post-Cold War hopes for shared security and collaboration with Russia, and the party concluded that European security would have to be guaranteed against Russia, not built with Moscow. Two years later, influential figures in the SPD would like to overturn this sober consensus brought about by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

It could be tempting to write off the manifesto, with its gauzy nostalgia for the period of Détente/Ostpolitik and its wishful thinking that Vladimir Putin is interested in peace and stability in Europe, as a last gasp of the SPD’s left wing, bitter at being marginalized by the modernizing leadership of Lars Klingbeil. When one remembers the hiccup at the origin of this government in May and the Merz coalition’s thin governing margin, the uprising among even a small group of SPD members could have more dramatic consequences. With 328 seats in a 630-seat parliament, thirteen defectors have the ability to hamper Chancellor Merz’s vision for a stronger European security and defense policy.

The manifesto of unhappy members of the SPD’s left wing landed two weeks before the SPD’s national congress June 27-29. After a masterful first month on the European and international stage, Chancellor Merz’s government may face its next challenge within its own ranks.