Fear Itself: What Stands Between Germany and a Better Foreign Policy

In late February, the center-right Christian Democrats (CDU) came in first in Germany’s snap winter Bundestag elections, parliamentary elections triggered in December 2024 when Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government lost a (planned) no-confidence vote. Chancellor-in-waiting Friedrich Merz now inherits the difficult task of advancing the country’s foreign policy Zeitenwende—a German phrase that translates to “epochal change” and was coined by outgoing Chancellor Scholz in February 2022 following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Proclaimed by Chancellor Scholz in a speech days after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Zeitenwende stood for the mammoth task of Germany reorienting its foreign policy to make up for years of neglect and naivete. Now three years later, it is evident that Scholz’s government ultimately failed to deliver on this promised change. Instead, Germany’s halting approach to supporting Ukraine and obstruction in dealing with European partners has both undermined and isolated the country. Merz will need to act rapidly to make this paradigm shift last. Doing so will require more than reforming the constitution to increase defense spending. It will require Germany as a whole to move beyond a worldview dominated by fear to accurately assess the dangers the country does (and does not) face and have an effective national discussion about the policies required to address these challenges. 

Germany today faces the most consequential moment in its postwar history since 1989, if not 1949. To its east, Russia views itself as at war with the West and is intent on rewriting the post-1990 European security order by force. Across the Atlantic to the west, the Trump administration has signaled a new era in U.S.-European relations built on pure transactionalism rather than shared values or commitments. Without the liberal democratic superpower that has helped Europe ward off authoritarian hegemony in three separate conflicts over the past century, the continent faces a profoundly threatening security environment. And at home, Germany faces economic stagnation and looming deindustrialization amid a larger European productivity crisis.

Germany is in the process of demolishing its past without knowing whether the future it is speeding toward is viable. With its automotive, chemical, and engineering industries all facing severe difficulties due to high energy costs, high labor costs, high corporate taxes, and excessive bureaucracy, the German economic model faces a crisis. A German industrial and manufacturing slowdown would mean more than just damaged prestige, however. German industry is the heart of its larger economy as each factory supports an entire network of suppliers.

These problems are compounded by the fact that Germany’s economy is not future-ready and has not embraced innovation. While German combustion engine cars remain highly competitive, for example, German electric vehicles lag behind competitors like Tesla because they are too expensive and because their technology is antiquated. Germany has fallen behind in practically all things digital, and what investments Germany has made have gone into older technologies, particularly in Germany’s famed Mittelstand—the often highly specialized middle-sized companies that have been lauded as Germany’s hidden champions. Ultimately, what a focus on cost competitiveness rather than investing in new technologies means is that should Germany’s existing industrial model go kaput, there isn’t a new one waiting in the wings to pick up the baton.

To navigate through this difficult domestic and international landscape, Merz will have to overcome the Angst, or fear, that has undermined Germany’s foreign policy and domestic politics for over a decade. It was a fear that waves of refugees would undo the hard-fought but fragile gains of 25 years of reunification that helped drive east Germans onto the streets in protest in fall 2014 and fueled the anti-Muslim PEGIDA protest movement—Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamification of the Occident—that served as the “transmission belt” for the rise of the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). Since then, the AfD has profited immensely from an electoral strategy premised on sowing fear and accusing Germany’s liberal democratic parties of desiring the downfall of German society. Having received approximately 20 percent of the vote in the recent 2025 winter elections, the AfD achieved its highest-ever level of support and will lead the opposition. For incoming Chancellor Merz’s coalition government, the wolves are waiting at the door. 

German politicians’ fear of their own voters has in turn prevented Germans from having a clear understanding of the challenges the country does and does not face and what it might take to address them. Germans’ existential fears, stemming from recent terrorist attacks, worsening climate change, and a rapidly changing global order, dominated the recent campaign. But rather than offering a positive vision or reminding Germans of the relative security they enjoy, leading politicians responded by catastrophizing about the real problems facing Germany.

Similarly, a fear that more Germans might turn to the AfD likely limited difficult but necessary discussions around Ukraine and how to pay for defense spending, making the winter campaign more one of handwringing than ambition. One observer went so far as to call the lack of foreign policy debate that marked the campaign a national security risk in itself. Admittedly, this fear may not be entirely ungrounded. While strong majorities of Germans want to continue to support Ukraine and significantly increase defense spending, only 43 percent indicated they would support cuts in other areas to make this foreign and defense policy a reality. Despite the immense structural and political advantages that Germany has today over its 1930s self, the run-up to February’s election was also marked by the fear that if the next government does not succeed, the AfD could win a majority in the 2029 elections—a fear echoed by Friedrich Merz himself. 

These mutually reinforcing fears are driven by deeper and more fundamental aspects of Germany’s postwar and post-1989 identity. For Germany, the period after 1989 was one of unprecedented security: as Chancellor Helmut Kohl remarked in 1997, “For the first time Germany is surrounded only by friends and partners.” The country had allegedly arrived at its historical destination, a system of parliamentary democracy upon which all other countries would eventually converge. However, it is also this past sense of security that today makes Germans more fearful. Ironically, greater security can make a population more fearful as the fear of anarchy produces an “imperative for security,” and a culture of fear feeds distrust, paranoia, and panic.

As they come to terms with a more belligerent world, Germans by and large remain strategic neophytes. Germany’s decades of peace and outsourcing of security mean that today few German politicians rate as top strategic thinkers. This in turn has led politicians, including Merz, to retreat from attempts to exercise deterrence for fear of being called a “firebrand,” to repeat outgoing Chancellor Scholz’s accusation against Merz. The lessons of Germany’s terrible history have over decades devolved into a rather simplistic moral aversion to discussions of military power and its legitimate uses. Germany’s years of being “Vergangenheitsbewältigungsweltmeister”—the world champion of reconciling with one’s past—may have had some side effects, including overcorrection.

More tragically, Germans’ fear of themselves and of their foreign policy instincts in a more geopolitically competitive world remains a significant obstacle. Few countries wanted to believe in the post-1989 “end of history” as much as Germany did, because few countries had their belief that they stood on the right side of history in the past century more shaken than Germany. It is exactly this inability to perceive itself on the side of good and to be able to trust its own instincts that has engendered the accusations of passivity and of an unwillingness to lead in the post-1989 world. A deep desire to avoid its total failures of the past has led Germany to be unable to risk making mistakes today. 

Germany’s lack of geopolitical instincts is tied directly to this loss of faith. For Germany, the concept of “Geopolitik,” as practiced by early 20th century strategists like Rudolf Kjellén or Karl Haushofer, led to the world historical catastrophes of the First and Second World Wars. A divided land, Germany then largely became the object of the geopolitics practiced by the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. After 1989, a combination of economic strength and guilt led Germans to practice geoeconomics without an eye for the underlying geopolitics, to the detriment of the country’s security.

These fears not only dull Germany’s foreign policy instincts but also are a profound national security weakness. The fear caused by poorly understood events can paralyze a population, making people prone to manipulation, intimidation, and exploitation. Populist autocrats like Russian President Vladimir Putin are masters at manipulating fear. By threatening the use of nuclear weapons, Putin likely hopes to limit Western support for Ukraine, to deter the West from directly intervening in support of Ukraine, and to engender hopelessness and paralysis among Western populaces. By claiming on the anniversary of the Battle of Stalingrad that Russia was “again” threatened by German tanks “with crosses on their armor” in Ukraine, Putin plays on Germans’ guilt and their fear of repeating the horrible mistakes of the past. And all to good effect. In November 2024, Chancellor Scholz refused to provide Ukraine with Taurus cruise missiles for fear that the Ukrainians would cause even greater Russian escalation by using them to attack Moscow, despite the Taurus having a similar range to missiles already provided to Ukraine by the United Kingdom and France. 

It is Merz’s ambition to be a historic chancellor, following in the footsteps of Konrad Adenauer and Angela Merkel. Doing so will require courage, hope, and resilience and inspiring the same in the German people. Achieving any form of freedom from fear will mean speaking plainly to the German people not only about the dangers they face and the sacrifices that will be necessary but also about the opportunities that might present themselves along the way.

Merz is one of the most unpopular politicians to have ever become chancellor of Germany. Since 1980, no candidate has ever been viewed more negatively during the preceding campaign and successfully become chancellor. Perhaps worse still, he is a politician who seems to make decisions based on gut feeling and according to what he believes people want to hear, features that lead to tactical errors and decisions that seem less than fully considered. Amid fundamental changes in Germany’s geopolitical environment, Merz’s inclination to take risks and preference for grand gestures clearly differentiates him from his predecessors. But whether he has the ability to explain to Germans what an admittedly unrealistic goal like achieving “independence” from the United States truly entails, and in so doing advance Germany’s foreign policy in a new strategic reality, remains to be seen.

Merz spent the entire campaign denying the need to take on new debt to finance German defense spending before making a 180-degree turn just after the election to support reforming the debt brake. This is not an encouraging sign that he will speak truth to voters. To meet his own lofty ambitions, he will need to prove himself willing to speak to Germans auf Augenhöhe—at eye level—about the path they will need to tread as a country.

Perhaps the chancellor-in-waiting, who has pitched himself to Germans as a decisive Macher may also prove himself capable of transformative leadership under the most difficult of circumstances. After all, in every beginning there is a little magic.