Merz
Friedrich Merz has been Chancellor for six months, and the register has genuinely changed. He talks about European power without three paragraphs of historical qualification. He has moved on defense. He has held on Ukraine. Whether any of this becomes a foreign policy is a different question, and six months is too short to answer it. But the preconditions are there in a way they weren’t under his predecessor, and that is worth taking seriously without being sentimental about it.
The comparison with Scholz is almost unfair to make, because Scholz set such a low bar. The Zeitenwende speech in February 2022 was genuinely surprising - a German chancellor standing before the Bundestag and acknowledging, in plain language, that the postwar order had ended. For about a week, it seemed like something might change. Then came the hedging: the delayed tank deliveries, the percentage-of-GDP accounting games, the endless consultations designed to produce inaction at the speed of process. The turning point that wasn’t. Scholz declared the Zeitenwende and then spent three years governing as if it hadn’t happened.
What the register actually means
Language matters in European politics more than analysts who focus on outputs tend to credit. When a German chancellor hedges, it doesn’t just reflect political timidity - it licenses timidity everywhere else. Germany is the EU’s largest economy. Its political signals travel. When Berlin treats every hard decision as a question still under deliberation, Warsaw and Paris and Rome read the signal and respond accordingly. The lowest common denominator gets set at the top.
Merz speaks differently. He uses the word “power” without apparent discomfort. He frames European security as a European responsibility without the usual genuflection toward Washington as the ultimate guarantor. He frames defense spending as something Germany has an interest in doing, rather than a concession extracted by American pressure. That framing matters because it changes the political economy of the decisions that follow. A government that moves on defense because it is being shamed into it will stop when the shaming stops. A government that moves because it has concluded European sovereignty requires it has a different basis for holding the position.
Whether Merz actually believes what he says, or whether he has simply read the strategic environment correctly and adjusted his rhetoric accordingly, is an interesting question and mostly irrelevant. Statesmen who talk themselves into positions are sometimes indistinguishable from ones who believe in them.
What six months has produced
On defense, movement is real. The commitment to exceed two percent of GDP is no longer presented as a ceiling being reluctantly reached but as a floor being established. The conversations in Berlin about European defense institutions - procurement, industrial capacity, command structures - are substantively different from the conversations happening two years ago. They are happening at all, which is progress.
On Ukraine, Merz has held. The political pressure to find an offramp has been considerable, and he has resisted it. The framing he uses - that Ukraine is fighting a war with direct consequences for European security - is the correct framing, and he has repeated it when it would have been easier to let it drift toward ambiguity.
In the context of recent German foreign policy, these are real changes. The baseline was set low enough that moving off it matters. The question is whether this is the beginning of a policy trajectory or a comfortable plateau.
What European leadership from Berlin actually requires
The harder tests have not arrived yet. Rhetoric about European power is easy when it costs nothing. The political costs of actual leadership are specific and predictable, and Merz has not yet been asked to pay most of them.
The Hungarian obstruction problem is not solved by talking about European sovereignty. It requires Berlin to push qualified majority voting into areas where unanimity currently produces paralysis - to be willing to move on foreign policy decisions over Budapest’s objection and absorb the political cost of doing so. That is a different thing from describing the problem.
European defense institutions that are genuinely independent of Washington require political capital with Washington - the willingness to be told that Europe is undermining NATO and to respond that Europe is guaranteeing its own security, which is not the same thing as undermining anything. That argument has not been tested yet.
Industrial policy that treats European sovereignty as a real constraint - on green technology, on semiconductors, on the defense industrial base - runs directly into member state interests and the instincts of an economics ministry trained on ordoliberal orthodoxy. Germany restructuring its own industrial strategy around European strategic logic rather than German export logic is the structural shift that would make everything else credible. It hasn’t happened.
The preconditions exist
Six months is not enough to know. Leaders who talk about power and then discover the costs of exercising it are a common species in European politics. Merz may prove to be one of them. The honest assessment is that the judgment has to wait.
What can be said is that the preconditions for German European leadership exist in a form they haven’t for years. A chancellor who thinks in European power terms. A security environment that makes the strategic case for him every morning. France and Poland looking for a Berlin that will move and co-anchor a European position rather than deliberate it to death. The window is open in a way it wasn’t.
The rhetoric is the precondition - you cannot lead where you cannot speak. But leading is what happens after. That part is still ahead of him.