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BERLIN, Jan 23, 2025 (BSS/AFP) - After years in which Germany's Chancellor Olaf Scholz has been accused of treading lightly on European and world stages, conservative election front-runner Friedrich Merz has vowed a bold return to international affairs.
The CDU leader has accused embattled centre-left Scholz of being parochial and often absent in EU affairs, and of neglecting the key Franco-German axis.
In the heated campaign ahead of February 23 elections, Merz loves to share an anecdote from an international summit in which a European leader allegedly prodded Scholz with the words "Olaf, say something!"
"If we want to lose all influence, if we want to make ourselves look ridiculous, let's continue to behave like this," Merz snapped in a recent speech.
A committed European and transatlanticist, Merz has said he wants "our country to be looked at with admiration again in the future, for us to be respected again in Europe".
Merz plans to create a national security council and may seek to streamline strategic policy by having his CDU control both the chancellery and foreign ministry, which have often jealously eyed each other.
He has pledged to reset troubled ties with Paris and Warsaw and, crucially, to reach out to Washington to rebuild Berlin's long testy relations with US President Donald Trump.
While Scholz has pushed back against Trump, especially on his designs on Greenland and the Panama Canal, Merz congratulated him on his inauguration with a hand-written letter.
Signalling he will engage with rather than shun the populist right, Merz has also praised Italy's premier Giorgia Meloni, the EU leader with the closest ties to Team Trump.
- Waning influence -
Many observers of European diplomacy back Merz's contention that Berlin's influence has waned under Scholz's unruly three-party coalition, which imploded in November.
While former chancellor Angela Merkel was both admired and disliked as a dominant voice and dealmaker in the EU, Scholz has struggled to project similar gravitas.
"Germany has clearly become less interested in the European Union ... Olaf Scholz did not understand that it was important to him," said Sophie Pornschlegel of the Jacques Delors Centre in Brussels.
Berlin often sent out mixed signals, coloured by ideological differences between the coalition of Scholz's Social Democrats, the Greens and the pro-business Free Democrats.
"Many partner countries got increasingly annoyed with the Scholz government," said Jacob Ross of the German Council on Foreign Relations.
Often Brussels and Paris felt that "the German position was changing rapidly and much more difficult to calculate than it has been in the past," he told AFP.
Post-war Germany, after the horrors of Nazi rule, long hesitated to match its economic heft with political or military muscle, instead stressing its commitment to a rules-based international order.
The first Trump term and his uncompromising America-first stance stunned Germany's political class, but Berlin acquiesced to his demand to step up defence spending to two percent of GDP, in line with NATO commitments.
Merz has now argued he can make a deal with the mercurial US president, venturing last week that "Trump is very predictable ... He means what he says and he does what he says".
- 'Occupied with itself' -
On defence spending, Merz said: "Trump is now speeding up a process in Europe that we should have undertaken," adding that a self-confident Europe has nothing to "fear".
"The Germans will do everything to keep the Americans in the European game, to maintain the American nuclear security guarantee at all costs," predicted Hans Stark at the French Institute of International Relations.
Ross warned, however, that Trump's Washington is tending not towards Berlin but to Warsaw, which has ramped up its defence spending to close to five percent of GDP.
"There will be a very strong dynamic in Washington to make Poland... what Germany has been throughout the Cold War -- the frontline in the confrontation with a neo-imperialist Russia," he said.
Germany, meanwhile, risks staying focused inwards for weeks if not months after the polls, given the drawn-out coalition negotiations that usually follow its parliamentary elections.
As the world changes rapidly, Ross warned, "it would be dramatic" if this process drags on for too long.
"Because then other European powers will be very, very tempted to run to Washington -- the Poles, the French, the Italians, the British -- to strike deals on a bilateral basis," he said.
"The risk is that everybody will be in Washington, negotiating and trying to position themselves, while Germany is again occupied with itself, with internal political negotiations, and really loses out."