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    The Guardian view on Ursula von der Leyen’s first 100 days: the steepest of learning curves | Editorial

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    In a press conference on Sunday to mark 100 days since the beginning of her second term as European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen erred on the side of understatement when asked whether she still considered the US to be an ally. The answer was yes, she replied, before adding that “we have our discussion points without question”.Hard to argue with that. Regarding the war in Ukraine, international trade and existential questions concerning the future of European defence and security, the geopolitical landscape bears no resemblance to the one that Ms von der Leyen looked out upon on 1 December. As Mr Trump and his “America first” outriders have confounded cherished assumptions about the transatlantic alliance, they have also sought to encourage authoritarian nationalism in EU member states.In France and Germany, the fabled engine of European integration, this has been uncomfortably akin to knocking at an open door. In Paris, days after Ms von der Leyen reassumed office, Michel Barnier’s shortlived government collapsed when Marine Le Pen pulled the rug from under it. In Germany, well before Elon Musk and JD Vance championed its cause, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party had reached historically high levels of support that would see it finish comfortably second in February’s snap German election.As Ms von der Leyen put it on Sunday: “Our European values, democracy, freedom, the rule of law are under threat.” The response, from Brussels and in national capitals, needs to be both robust and more expeditious than is often the case in the labyrinthine world of EU policymaking. Happily, the initial signs are positive.The move last week by EU leaders to disapply the bloc’s fiscal rules to military spending, potentially freeing up £670bn, is a significant step towards achieving greater strategic autonomy from Washington. It followed the unveiling of extraordinarily radical proposals in the same week by Germany’s chancellor-in-waiting, Friedrich Merz. Bypassing a constitutional restriction on state borrowing, these are designed to facilitate not only far greater spending on defence, but also on the modernisation of a stagnating economy.After decades in which EU economic policy has been skewed by Berlin’s traditional debt aversion – shared with other “frugal” member states such as the Netherlands and Denmark – this is a very different direction of travel. As Europe exits an era defined by an uncritical commitment to free trade and dependency on the US security umbrella, it is also the right one. Recognising the desire of many member states to formalise common borrowing arrangements introduced following Covid, Ms von der Leyen said “nothing is off the table” in relation to defence. But, as the Draghi report argued last autumn, the same kind of fiscal firepower is required to meet the challenge of the green transition and compete with the US and China for the jobs and future industries of the 21st century.Last month in Brussels, a different kind of centenary was marked when a bust of a former commission president, Jacques Delors, was unveiled. Born in 1925, Mr Delors became the preeminent champion of a “social” vision, in which common EU institutions would deploy pooled resources in order to build a Europe where solidarity and growth were intertwined. That perspective faded from view following the neoliberal turn in the 1980s. As Ms von der Leyen navigates the rest of her five-year term, its time has come again.

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      The US embrace of Russia is an existential threat to the EU. Germany must step up to save it | Catherine De Vries

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      In February 1945, three world leaders – Winston Churchill, Franklin D Roosevelt and Josef Stalin – met in Crimea for the Yalta conference, to discuss the new world order they would implement after the soon-to-end second world war.Smaller nations were given no say in deciding their fate. The Soviet sphere of influence would infest eastern Europe for decades and US foreign policy dominated the second half of the 20th century. Churchill resisted the end of the UK’s global empire and independence for Britain’s colonies came piecemeal; they were let go with bitterness.Eighty years on, the logic present at Yalta – that large states can impose their will on smaller states – is back. Might is once again right. But history is repeating itself with a striking difference – for this time, there is no European leader at the table. Russian and US delegations have sat down to discuss Ukraine’s future without Ukraine or the EU’s input. Eighty years down the line, Europe is no longer seen as relevant by the great powers.The urgency of Europe’s shifting geopolitical landscape was laid bare last Sunday in London, where European leaders gathered with their counterparts from the UK, Canada, Turkey, the EU and Nato for a high-level defence summit. That meeting came as a result of the very public collapse of White House talks between Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Donald Trump, and Trump’s suspension of military aid to Ukraine.Even if a reported reconciliation between Washington and Kyiv materialises, European officials are still reeling from the rapidity of the transatlantic rupture so early in Trump’s second term. Trump’s defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, last month warned Europe it could no longer rely on US security guarantees. JD Vance, the US vice-president, went further at the Munich Security Conference, calling Europe – not Russia or China – the primary US threat.Pax Americana – the postwar period of relative peace in the western hemisphere, with the US as the dominant economic, cultural and military world power – is over. Europe will quickly have to adapt to the new reality, with the loss of its primary strategic and military partner. What part now will the EU’s largest member state, Germany, play?Despite large gains by the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which doubled its support in the federal election on 23 February, Germany will be led by Friedrich Merz, head of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU). The chancellor-in-waiting lost no time in declaring that Europe, faced with an increasingly adversarial US, must take its fate into its own hands.“It is my absolute priority to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that we can actually become independent from the US step by step,” Merz said, hours after his election victory. Stark words from a politician who as recently as a few months ago was a bona fide Atlanticist.Merz wants to forge greater unity in Europe and establish an independent European defence capability. It remains to be seen how he will go about achieving this, but he clearly aims to put Germany back into the European driving seat.German leadership has been lacking in recent years. While Paris and Warsaw took increasingly assertive positions on European security, Berlin has remained cautious. After the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, the chancellor, Olaf Scholz, spoke of a Zeitenwende – a turning point in German policy to reflect the new realities of the world. But, in the end, little but hot air was produced.Since the end of the second world war, Germany has invested relatively little in military capacity. Under the Nato umbrella, and with the close partnership with the US, this was not seen as a problem. But the world has fundamentally shifted, and Merz sees that Germany, finally, must change, too.However, an emboldened new Germany, at the head of the EU, faces a harsh world and an even harsher set of realities. The country will not only have to increase its military capacity, bring about bloc-wide military cooperation and perhaps even station troops in Ukraine, but it will also have to pay for all of this.This will require overhauling Germany’s strict ceiling on public borrowing, the so-called Schuldenbremse (debt brake) enshrined in the constitution. Merz has now begun that process; on Tuesday, his party struck agreement with its prospective coalition partners, the SPD, on the creation of a special €500bn (£390bn) fund to boost defence and infrastructure spending that would be exempt from the debt constraint. If approved by the German parliament, this would amount to a dramatic and some critics warn risky loosening of the budgetary straitjacket.Merz will also have to rally the EU (though Trump’s harrying of Europe and Zelenskyy is already pushing European leaders toward his vision), as well as face down Trump-friendly far-right parties, many of them in ascendence across the bloc.At a recent meeting in Madrid of the rightwing radical bloc of the European parliament, the Patriots for Europe, Geert Wilders, leader of the far-right PVV in the Netherlands, praised Trump as a “brother in arms”. Slovakia’s prime minister, Robert Fico, expressed his support for Trump’s pro-Russian policy at the rightwing Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Maryland last month. AfD co-leader Alice Weidel has said that “Trump is implementing the policies that the AfD has been demanding for years”.These rightist politicians seem willing to risk Europe’s security and prosperity for political gain. The US turn toward Russia and away from democracy will be an existential test for the European project and Europe’s commitment to law and democracy. The art of European cooperation has long been to achieve the possible in unforeseen circumstances. Germany, under chancellor-elect Merz, has a steep learning curve ahead. But the task of stepping up to save Ukraine – and Europe – falls to Berlin.

      Catherine De Vries is professor of political science at Bocconi University in Milan More

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      The Guardian view on Germany’s election: a chance to reset for a new era | Editorial

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      When Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, chose in November to force this weekend’s snap election, it felt like awkward timing. In the United States, Donald Trump had just won a decisive victory and was promising to move fast and break things. With a political storm brewing, was this the right time for the EU’s most important member state to embark on a period of prolonged introspection?Three tumultuous months later, with German democracy itself in the crosshairs of a hostile Trump administration, Sunday’s poll feels more like a valuable opportunity for an emergency reset. Any federal election carries huge significance beyond Germany’s borders. This poll is distinguished by being the first of a new era – one in which the transatlantic alliance that underpinned Europe’s postwar security can no longer be relied upon. Its outcome will be fundamental to shaping the EU’s response to that new reality, as existential decisions are made over defence spending and protecting Ukraine.With the centre-right coalition of the Christian Democratic Union and the Christian Social Union comfortably ahead in the polls, the strong likelihood is that Mr Scholz, a Social Democrat, will be replaced as chancellor by Friedrich Merz. Mr Merz has emphasised the need to stand up to bullying from Mr Trump over Ukraine and potential trade tariffs. Increasingly hawkish on Russia and the need to protect the EU’s eastern flank, he would be likely to take a more expansive approach on the European stage than Mr Scholz, whose inward focus exasperated the French president, Emmanuel Macron.Mr Scholz had his reasons for that. However alarming the international outlook, for many voters Germany’s urgent priorities remain narrowly domestic. A spate of fatal attacks involving migrant suspects has been ruthlessly exploited by the far‑right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, driving immigration to the top of the political agenda.All mainstream parties remain committed to the traditional firewall excluding the AfD from power (though Mr Merz relied on its votes to pass a recent opposition motion on stricter migration rules). But polls suggest it will achieve a comfortable second place on Sunday – a deeply disturbing position of strength for an ethno-nationalist party officially classified as suspected extremist. The party’s growing popularity among under-35 voters, and particularly among young men, is ominous.The rise of the far right has been accelerated by prolonged economic stagnation. Post-pandemic, Germany’s business model has been crushed by an end to the era of cheap Russian energy, higher interest rates and falling demand for its exports. Since Covid, almost a quarter of a million manufacturing jobs have been lost, in a country that prided itself on being Europe’s industrial powerhouse. A historic reluctance to borrow to invest – constitutionally enshrined in the 2008 debt brake – has become a liability, stymieing Mr Scholz’s attempts to respond.A suddenly isolated Europe needs a confident and prospering Germany at its heart. In a fragmented political landscape, it will almost certainly fall to another broad coalition government, led by Mr Merz, to try to deliver this. The AfD will, meanwhile, position itself as a Trumpian alternative-in-waiting, talked up by the likes of Elon Musk and the US vice‑president, JD Vance. Rarely has it been so important that the politics of moderation and consensus should succeed. In the post‑reunification era, the stakes both inside and outside Germany have never felt higher. More

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      Hold your breath and look to Germany: its election could decide the fate of Europe – and the UK | Martin Kettle

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      Even in less stressed times, Britain always pays too much attention to the US and too little to Germany. In today’s torrid circumstances, that imbalance is perhaps excusable. After all, Donald Trump, it now turns out, really means it. He is more interested in US plunder and profit from places like Gaza, Ukraine and Greenland than in upholding a just peace or good order.Even so, the inattention towards Germany needs to end. Britain’s politicians, like German politicians, are rewiring their worldviews amid a political gale. But Germany, though no longer a great power, is nevertheless a great nation. Indeed, it may be more than ever the essential European nation now, after the Trump administration’s very public trashing of the entire Atlantic alliance seemed to leave Europe to its own devices.The German general election, this coming Sunday, is an event with consequences. Primarily, of course, those consequences will be felt in Germany itself, with its extended economic stagnation, its anxieties about migration and borders, its traditional fears about borrowing, its nervousness about military commitments, and its sudden lurching anxiety that the US is ready to allow Russia to threaten the lands on its eastern frontier.Germany’s inherent importance, though, means the election will also help determine whether Europe – not just the EU – is able to cope with Trump’s second term. Will that Europe be able to deliver the defence and security to protect not merely Ukraine, a daunting enough task, but the Baltic republics, Poland and the other former Soviet satellite states too? Can it reform its faltering economic model? These are reverberations that Britain cannot avoid, even if it wants to.Needless to say, the German election has received only a fraction of the attention that this country’s political class lavishes on a US election. Equally predictably, much of that very limited amount of attention is absorbed by a fixation – one that is shared to a degree by the German media – with the populist anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party. As a result, however, the likely victor on Sunday, the centre-right CDU-CSU coalition under the probable next chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has barely been scrutinised at all.This contest is occurring against a backdrop of economic failure, not success. The German economy shrank in 2023 and again in 2024. It seems likely to stay in recession again this year. It adds up to the longest period of economic stagnation since the fall of Hitler in 1945. Whoever emerges as chancellor after Sunday will face choices very similar to those confronting Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves.The reasons for Germany’s decline are not hard to understand. Germany’s dependence on Russian energy meant prices soared after the invasion of Ukraine. Olaf Scholz’s three-party coalition government, in power since 2021, has scaled back that dependence – renewables now produce 60% of German energy – but not eliminated it. German car exports have become more expensive, while China has surged ahead in the production of cheaper electric vehicles. A tariff war with the US now looms.All this has provided a system shock to a country still strongly conditioned by its craving for postwar stability. “We have used up our old success, and not invested in new things,” the commentator Theo Koll told the UK in a Changing Europe podcast this week. “We have for a long time lived in a kind of ‘Gore-Tex republic’ … we wanted it nice and cosy inside and all the unpleasant things had to be outside.”The rise of the AfD, amid the perception that irregular migration is out of control, is the single most visible sign that the old political era has ended. It has been quickened by violent killings where migrants are suspects during the election campaign in Magdeburg, Aschaffenburg and, last week, Munich. The latest Politico poll of polls puts the AfD on 21%, double what it secured in the previous federal election in 2021, running second to the CDU-CSU on 29%, but ahead of Scholz’s SPD on 16% and the Greens on 13%.By that token, though, a victory for Merz’s CDU-CSU on 23 February would be genuinely significant. It would be significant even though 29% would be a decline from the 42% that the parties took under Angela Merkel in 2013. It would show, in Europe’s heartland, that the line can be held against populism of the right. This is not a trivial lesson, especially after the debacle of the French assembly election last year.It would also be a vote of confidence, albeit a relatively weak one, for one of Europe’s few remaining big parties of the centre right. Once-powerful parties like the French Gaullists can only look on with frustration and envy – to say nothing of Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives. Not least, it would also be a rebuke to those like Elon Musk and JD Vance who have actively promoted the AfD from abroad.Yet it would also pose two big questions. The first, and more immediate, would be the coalition that Merz would construct and the content of its programme. Everything here depends on which parties qualify for the Bundestag and on how many seats each wins. Merz has repeatedly ruled out governing with the AfD, so his main coalition partner could be Scholz’s diminished SPD or, less likely in view of Merz’s commitment to growth, the Greens.If the polls are right, however, whatever Merz comes up with is likely to be a weak coalition. This would give him relatively little leeway to drive reforms of the kind he advocates – familiar themes to UK readers, like benefit cuts, ending business red tape and raising defence spending. He is, though, open to loosening the constitutionally enshrined “debt brake”, which is blocking much-needed public investment. It is likely to take until Easter before we know the full coalition picture.The other, intimately related, question would be about Germany’s borders. Merz triggered huge protests when the AfD backed his bill allowing Germany to turn asylum seekers and other migrants back at the border. This prompted a rare rebuke from Merkel, that Merz had abandoned a historically resonant firewall against far-right support. Yet border controls matter for any state that seeks to ensure the security, including the social welfare, of its citizens, and Germany is not the only country where voters are demanding greater effectiveness.Sunday’s election is a critical European moment, and would be even if Trump did not exist. The key question is not, at least at this stage, about the rise of the extreme right. It is about the continuing viability of the centre right, or the adaptability of what Merkel, from early in her career as party leader, dubbed “the new social capitalism”. The current recession has put this vision to an unforgiving test. Merz will be judged by the outcome, if he wins power. It is a moment that matters for Germany – but also for us.

      Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist More