How Merz Hopes To End The Indecisive ‘German Vote’ In Brussels

By Nick Alipour

(EurActiv) — Europe’s fate partly lies in the hands of sixteen Germans.  

That’s how many negotiators will design the future European policy of the continent’s largest and most populous economy, as the Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Social Democrats (SPD) thrash out a coalition agreement in talks that started yesterday. 

The section on European affairs in the agreement has not usually been a major priority. But this time around, the negotiators got a special assignment from the very top. 

After three years of German indecision in Brussels, Friedrich Merz, the Christian Democrat chancellor-in-waiting, wants the country to take on a major leadership role in deciding the response to the myriad of challenges facing the continent. 

His solution? An institutional redesign that would assign more power over European policymaking to himself.

It would help avoid the chronic deadlock between successive multi-party governments that’s left Berlin silent on key EU issues in recent years. But it’s also likely to ruffle feathers in coalition talks that are only just getting underway.

Merz stresses that the alternative would be dire, however: “If Germany remains silent, (…) we are also damaging the ability of the entire European community to act,” he said in a programmatic speech on his future foreign policy in January.  

Chronic indecision in Berlin

The SPD likely shares Merz’s diagnosis, as few were happy about the impression that Germany’s SPD-led three-party coalition left in Brussels over the last three years.

With European decision-making divvied up between different parties and ministries, indecision on key issues has been a problem at least since the days of Angela Merkel’s ‘Grand Coalitions’.

Where the French president has almost full authority over his country’s European course, the chancellor must find a common position within his government.

When German coalition partners fail to agree on a joint position, then Berlin must abstain from voting on EU legislation  – an outcome that’s become so common it’s dubbed the ‘German vote’.

In Berlin, a multi-departmental legislative file like EU migration reform has to be greenlighted by all ministries involved, requiring – in the case of migration – the approval of the foreign and interior ministers.

Even the responsibility for coordination is split. The Chancellery’s EU department can step in to adjudicate political conflicts between the parties; but the Foreign Office and the Economy Ministry are formally in charge of coordination between ministries, government sources explained.

They also split responsibility for prepping European Council summits with the Chancellery, while a junior minister at the Foreign Office controls the EU reform and enlargement portfolios. That gives the Foreign Office – typically held by a junior coalition partner – a good deal of influence over EU matters.

In short, it is a patchwork of overlapping responsibilities that has often left little space for Berlin to put forward a cohesive European vision.

Things deteriorated under outgoing Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s three-party government, which featured near-constant conflict between Scholz’s Social Democrats, the Greens and the free-market liberal Free Democrats (FDP).

“In this past legislative period, almost all ministers [lacked] a sense for Europe,” acknowledged one SPD source, also pointing to Scholz’s detachment from the issue, as he is mainly “a transatlanticist”.

The coalition partners repeatedly failed to engage with key EU legislation until the last minute, only to ultimately abstain from taking any position at all over a lack of agreement in Berlin.

The most notorious example was the EU’s proposed ban on the sale of new petrol cars, which had been fully negotiated in Brussels – only to be blocked when Germany pulled out just before the final vote due to an internal veto by the FDP. That Germany, home to a mighty car industry, hadn’t weighed in earlier left many elsewhere in the EU baffled and irritated.

Is a mightier Merz the answer?

Merz has vowed to end all of the above.

He is not planning on taking chances by relying on verbal commitments alone, as the previous coalition agreement did. Merz is aiming for an institutional redesign, as he outlined in January.

The first pillar will be to create a powerful new national security council that he hopes to turn into “the centre of gravity for the government’s collective decision-making on all the main issues of foreign, security, development, and European policy”.

The second pillar is to unite the steering power over European policy directly under the chancellor.

The catch? Getting his perspective coalition partners to go along with that power grab won’t be easy.

Creating a security council is likely the least controversial part, as the SPD had previously attempted to create such an institution under Scholz, only to be blocked by the Greens.

But with an SPD politician almost certain to lay claim to the Foreign Office, it’s unlikely they’d agree to shipping those European competences over to the Chancellery without a fight.

“I think we would protest strongly,” said the SPD source.  “We would not be smart if we left European policy entirely to the Christian Democrats, because European policy is also extremely important for the crucial areas of the economy and energy.” 

Experts still believe that Merz has a chance to improve European policy coordination, as the SPD’s new leaders also have an interest in strengthening Germany’s leadership in Europe, according to an analysis of the wider European impact of the German election by the Jacques Delors Centre’s Johannes Lindner, Thu Nguyen, and Jannik Jansen.

“However, complete centralisation in the Chancellery will not be possible – if only because of [ministerial independence] and the need for coordination between the CDU/CSU and SPD,” Lindner told Euractiv.

A lot will hinge on ministers’ ability to improve timely coordination, he argued.

“The coalition negotiations now are a first test of how close they are to each other on the most important European policy issues.”