Merz, pax americana
and German nightmare

“ It happens to me at times to wake up in the morning and wonder whether this isn’t just a bad dream.”

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has a quality that’s increasingly rare among politicians: he lets his intimate thoughts slip out. Sometimes even what his less reckless colleagues think, as when he explained that Israel “is doing the dirty work in our place.”

The nightmare that at present torments him is the coming of Pax Americana to its end. For him, the West, once the ruler of the planet, has been reduced to a geographical expression. What Merz cannot – and will not – admit is that Germany has lost its primacy in Europe. But not because of his fault.

It’s easy to point the finger at this dull character, incapable of governing his own party. The first chancellor who failed to be elected by Parliament on the first ballot, he hasn’t gotten anything right, so much so that some are predicting his early fall. The first chancellor to be defeated in a European Council—formerly dominated by Angela Merkel—on an issue he called crucial to “European sovereignty,” the use of Russian funds tied up abroad to aid Ukraine. So weak in his CDU that he let the Adenauer Foundation, much more than a party think tank, lose the presidential candidate, defeated by Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, the woman Merkel had wanted to succeed her as chancellor.

Merz is the finger. The moon is the coming to its end of eighty years of Germany’s exemption from history. As the linchpin of the European family enlisted in the American-led Atlantic Alliance. During the Cold War, as a semi-protectorate of the Stars and Stripes under the motto “Americans in, Russians out, and Germans down,” in the unsavory Franco-German entente (“couple” for the French, “friendship” for the Germans). Then, during the thirty-five years of pseudo-German unification, mistaken by Germanophobes for Greater Germany if not for the Fourth Reich, Berlin spent asserting its centrality in European politics, especially in fiscal and monetary matters, but without a strategic compass. An approach summed up in Merkel’s motto, “When I think of Germany, I think of windows tightly closed.”

The dream of a Bundesrepublik disguised as Greater Switzerland ended forever on February 24, 2022, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. A storm blew open the half-closed windows between the Rhine and the Oder, casting a sinister light on a country anesthetized by the “end of history.” Then-Chancellor Olaf Scholz, vying with Merz for the title of the least authoritative leader in German history, was quick to proclaim the “epochal turning point” (Zeitenwende).

Three years later, Merz, with his usual tact, vows to make the Bundeswehr the most powerful army in Europe, while the question of the atomic bomb, “European” or national, fuels public debate. Merz relaunches a sort of “voluntary conscription”—when the world is upside down, the hour of oxymorons strikes—to recall those refractory to the duty of defending their homeland. Re-education from scratch, given the degree of delegitimization of the military in a country that lost two world wars, a pacifism without (almost) ifs and buts has prevailed.

In Merz’s view, Germany today “is not yet at war, but it is no longer at peace.” So, it sits between two chairs: an uncomfortable position in itself. Distressing. With the end of peace, certainties and habits internalized by three generations of Germans have collapsed. Economic well-being is threatened by the industrial crisis, especially the automotive industry (you can’t get out of it quickly by producing tanks), by the forced (see Nord Stream 2) renunciation to Russian gas, and by the loss of significant market share in China.

The transformation from a proud ant to a fiscal grasshopper, supported by the significant fiscal margins accumulated, including at the expense of the Eurozone, is the hallmark of the pragmatism of a ruling class that has so far been careful to paint its economic policy with an ethical veneer. And it signals the difficulty of adapting a European leadership born of good weather to steely storms. Translated into Italian political jargon, this is the end of the “external constraint,” that is, of our faith in others’ will to educate us in virtue. The temptation to float is strong. Too bad our boat isn’t properly caulked for such rough waves.