Merz Challenges Germans to Make a Bold Strategic Shift. Will They Do It?

Germany’s centrist politicians are losing votes to the far right and the far left. They are losing faith in America, their longtime friend and protector.

And they are rapidly losing what could be their best chance to address both those problems at once.

The German government in waiting, led by the likely next chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said on Friday that it had reached an agreement with the Green Party on a raft of measures that it was billing as an urgent response to President Trump and his administration’s threats to withdraw American military support for Europe.

The package would rip away Germany’s signature limits on government spending and allow for hundreds of billions — or potentially trillions — of euros in new efforts to rebuild the country’s aging infrastructure and military.

Mr. Merz and his center-right Christian Democrats, who narrowly won elections in February, are trying to push the changes through a lame-duck session of Parliament.

If they are ultimately successful, it could help determine whether Germany is prepared to make a seminal strategic shift. It will also shape Europe’s fate as it confronts its most hostile security environment since World War II.

“Do you seriously believe that an American government will agree to continue NATO as before at the NATO summit in The Hague at the end of June if Germany and, together with Germany, the European NATO partners, are not prepared to take a new path?” Mr. Merz asked lawmakers in a fiery speech on Thursday when the measures were introduced.

The parliamentary cliffhanger in Berlin is playing out on a much more accelerated timeline than Germans are accustomed to. Typically after an election, the winner takes months to secure a governing agreement with one or more coalition partners.

But having struck an early deal with the center-left Social Democrats, Mr. Merz has taken the extraordinary step of trying to push his spending plan through the lame-duck Parliament, rather than wait for its replacement this month, when the legislative math for him will be worse.

Mr. Merz’s Christian Democrats won the election with a relatively low voter share, and his two-party coalition with the Social Democrats will have only a narrow majority in the new Parliament. Because the spending plan must overcome constitutional limits, it requires even more than a simple majority.

In the new Parliament, Mr. Merz would need support from either the newly empowered Die Linke, the party of the far left, or the hard-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, to pass the spending plan. The first is an unlikely ally, and the second is taboo because it is considered extremist.

Even in the departing Parliament, Mr. Merz’s challenge is difficult enough, requiring support from the center-left Green Party, his punching bag in the campaign.

The three parties had been negotiating for the past week, and time was running out.

Speaking in Parliament on Thursday as the proposals were put forward, Mr. Merz promised 50 billion euros, about $54 billion, for a climate and energy transformation fund. He also agreed with widening the definition of spending exempt from borrowing limits — a request by the Greens — to also include intelligence, aid to Ukraine, and response to natural disasters or other events threatening public peace.

“What more could you ask for?” Mr. Merz asked the Green Party lawmakers.

Analysts, commentators and many political leaders had cast the next few days as a test for Germany’s mainstream parties, left and right. Could they muster a compromise? Or would domestic political squabbles block them from acting, as has been the case so often in Germany and other European democracies in recent years?

The urgency and boldness of Mr. Merz’s gambit has been spurred by Mr. Trump.

Mr. Merz and his allies say publicly and privately that they have been jarred by Mr. Trump’s moves to undo a decades-long American security guarantee in Europe and by his sharp pivot on American support for Ukraine in its war against Russia.

Mr. Merz has publicly questioned the stability of Germany’s alliance with America and wondered whether the United States will remain a democracy. He has also significantly increased his proposals for new military spending, while abandoning campaign promises to avoid heavy borrowing while strengthening defense.

The deal Mr. Merz reached with the Social Democrats, the diminished party of the departing Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and the Greens would allow effectively unlimited borrowing for any spending on defense that exceeds 1 percent of the nation’s annual economy, a level it already exceeds.

As a sweetener for the Social Democrats, he also agreed to borrow 500 billion euros over a decade to upgrade Germany’s domestic infrastructure.

The size of the borrowing increases broke sharply from years of relatively austere German budgets. But Mr. Merz said last week that such moves could no longer be postponed “after the latest decisions by the American government.” He added: “In view of the threat to our freedom and to peace on our continent, the mantra for our defense has to be, ‘Whatever it takes.’”

His move to pass the changes to the Constitution while the old Parliament is still in power was seen by some experts as a cunning political move that would also ensure enough of a fiscal pillow to keep a centrist government stable.

The session on Thursday was only the second time in modern history that German lawmakers met after an election and before the swearing in of the new Parliament. The last was when the Bundestag decided to send German soldiers into Kosovo in 1998 — the first German military deployment outside of the country since World War II.

The current session convened in a cloud of uncertainty, because Mr. Merz made his initial plans without consulting with the Greens, who are not partners in the likely next coalition.

They have had a contentious relationship with Mr. Merz’s party and its sister party in Bavaria, the Christian Social Union, for years, particularly in the recent campaign.

Mr. Merz attacked the Greens on the trail long after they ceased to be a threat to him. In one of the last speeches before the election, he berated “Greens and left-wing crackpots” and told the crowd that the Greens’ time had passed.

Markus Söder, the leader of the Christian Social Union, seemed to relish in celebrating the conservatives’ victory over the Greens, who were part of the outgoing coalition of Mr. Scholz. “Goodbye, have a nice trip, good riddance!” he said during a speech last week.

Nevertheless, Mr. Merz seemed to take the party’s support for his spending deal as a given. His charm offensive to Green leaders last weekend was limited to a voice message he left for one politician, offering to add the word “climate” in the official text justifying the new measures.

Many German analysts saw the move as a negotiating tactic, because the Greens have long pushed for more borrowing to rebuild the country’s defense.

While the Greens had said they were prepared to help undo the debt limit for military spending both at home and in support of Ukraine, they had insisted that they would not support the infrastructure spending unless it was redefined.

“Pouring money into everything and doing so on credit, on a debt-financed basis for future generations. That is what we will not support,” Franziska Brantner, a Green party co-chairwoman, said in a public radio interview on Wednesday.

If the parties had not agreed to a deal, their task would have grown more difficult: the far left and far right gained seats in the recent elections, and they could block any major borrowing overhauls in the new Parliament.

Lars Klingbeil, one of the leaders of the Social Democrats, alluded to that challenge in a speech on Thursday.

“When history comes knocking, you better open the door, because you never know if there might be a second chance,” he said.