In the final days of Germany’s abbreviated election campaign, the
task facing its next chancellor has snapped into focus. It appears far more existential, for the country and for all of Europe, than almost anyone initially imagined.
Germany’s coalition government came apart just a day after the U.S. presidential election last November. As a result, a vote that was supposed to come this September is now set for Sunday. German leaders quickly realized that meant their campaign would be largely fought in the early days of President Trump’s second term.
They were nervous from the start. But they were nowhere near prepared.
In just a few short weeks, the new Trump team has cut Ukraine and Europe out of negotiations to end the war with Russia, and embraced an aggressive, expansionist regime in Moscow that now breathes down Europe’s neck. It also threatened to withdraw troops that have protected Germany for decades.
How Germans vote will now be a critical component of Europe’s response to Mr. Trump’s new world order, and will resonate far beyond their borders.
“It is not just another change of government” under Mr. Trump,
Friedrich Merz, the leading candidate for chancellor, warned on Friday after taking the stage for an arena rally in the western town of Oberhausen, “but a complete redrawing of the world map.”
Perhaps no one has distilled the stakes of the election more succinctly — ironically enough — than the prime minister of Greece,
a country that famously clashedwith the Germans when it was digging out of a financial crisis a decade ago. Kyriakos Mitsotakis, a fellow conservative, addressed Mr. Merz in a recorded message broadcast to 4,000 attendees at the Oberhausen rally. He reminded the audience of Greece’s emergence from its economic woes, and encouraged Mr. Merz to engineer a similar turnaround.
“Dear Friedrich,” Mr. Mitsotakis said, “Germany and Europe need your leadership.”
Mr. Merz and other candidates, including the current center-left chancellor, Olaf Scholz, have
warned of strained or even severed ties with the United States, while vowing to fill a continental and global leadership vacuum.
Mr. Merz openly questioned this past week whether the United States would remain a democracy much longer — or slip into full autocratic rule — and whether NATO would continue to exist. Mr. Scholz has said that Germany and Europe must be prepared to go it alone without Mr. Trump.
The question is what any of the candidates will be able to do about that.
Germany has been weakened by crises at home and abroad. The country’s export-driven
industrial business model is broken. Its economy is no larger today than it was five years ago, and it is losing ground to the rest of Europe and other wealthy nations on
several key measures of economic health.
Its domestic politics are mired in disputes about immigration, regulation, government spending and the mountains of paperwork that Germans must navigate to deal with daily tasks.
Among the other challenges for Germany is that Trump administration officials, including Vice President JD Vance and Elon Musk, have also embraced a hard-right political party, the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, that revels in Nazi slogans and is ostracized by all of the country’s mainstream parties.
Its likely second-place finish on Sunday is expected to heighten the sense of fracturing and potential paralysis in German politics.
The last German chancellor to be seen as a leader of Europe was Mr. Merz’s longtime party rival, Angela Merkel. She did so in part by forging a partnership with President Barack Obama. The current moment might demand the opposite.
No
European head of state has emerged to lead the continent in opposition to Mr. Trump’s foreign policy or his economic plans, including threats of tariffs that could target European companies. Two leaders who might have filled that role, President Emmanuel Macron of France and Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain, have been hurt in their efforts by low approval ratings at home.
Nonetheless, they will travel separately to the White House this week, hoping to at least persuade Mr. Trump to slow the pace of his possible disengagement from Europe.
It could be weeks or months for a new German leader to join them. Even after the votes are counted, the winner will need to form a governing coalition, a historically plodding process.
Polls suggest that Mr. Merz will almost certainly not win a majority in Sunday’s vote, and that he could enter with relatively low approval ratings for a chancellor-to-be. Still, his fresh face could provide a jolt Europe needs.
“With a waning or even unreliable U.S. presence on the continent,” said Sudha David-Wilp, the vice president of external relations of the German Marshall Fund in Berlin, “Merz could be the chancellor at the right moment to heed the call.”
The incumbent, Mr. Scholz, has been hindered globally ever since his government crumbled last fall. He is now polling in third place, behind Mr. Merz and the AfD — a party that no other mainstream party will invite into government.
Mr. Scholz has shed some of his stoic image in recent days and grown more combative, both toward Mr. Trump and toward Mr. Merz. He promised stronger German leadership to nearly 2,000 supporters at his final campaign stop on Friday. He was in Dortmund, one of the last remaining strongholds for his Social Democratic party, and just an hour down the road from Mr. Merz’s rally.
“I find it irritating how everyone is now surprised by the current American administration. You could read all of this beforehand,” Mr. Scholz said. “And in this respect, we as Germany must also be capable of acting, namely by solving our problems in Germany and Europe and by sticking together in doing so.”
“We can do this,” he added. “The European economic area, with its 450 million inhabitants, is larger and stronger than the United States. We can manage our own affairs.”
Polls suggest that Mr. Scholz is a long-shot to retain his job. The more intense guessing game among German political analysts is what sort of coalition might emerge from Sunday’s result, with Mr. Merz at the helm — and how much it might help or hurt Mr. Merz’s global ambitions.
If his Christian Democrats win around a third of the vote, or if only a few other parties pass an electoral threshold for taking seats in Parliament, Mr. Merz could likely form a government with just one other party.
He has said that would never be with the AfD, parts of which Germany’s domestic intelligence agency considers extremist, though together they are expected to have a majority.
If the vote is more splintered and more parties clear the threshold, Mr. Merz could be forced into a three-party coalition. As Mr. Scholz learned, three-party governments tend to be more fragile, and more prone to infighting that slows down major legislation.
Being forced into a larger coalition, many Christian Democrats and their supporters concede, would almost certainly sap Mr. Merz’s power to push deregulation, tax cuts and other domestic initiatives through Parliament in a bid to boost the economy.
And if Mr. Merz is unable to reignite growth, analysts say, he will struggle to project the economic power needed to lead Europe — or to find the revenue to help Germany accelerate its rearmament.
Mr. Merz betrayed few worries on Friday, flogging his potential future coalition partners, including the Social Democrats and the Green Party, in his speech in Oberhausen.
“We look forward to seeing you here again in a few years,” he told the crowd — four years from now, perhaps, at the end of the next federal election campaign.
“Then we will look back at this year 2025, on the federal elections and the results,” he said. “And then we will be asked whether we have correctly assessed the situation, and whether we have drawn the right conclusions from it.”
