1 year in the chancellery: has Merz met the expectations of his partners?

Małgorzata Gemen: Good neighborliness or strategic partnership?

May 6, 2026 marks the first anniversary of Friedrich Merz taking office as Chancellor. Merz had displayed his international ambitions even before his election in a speech given at the “Körber Global Leaders’ Dialog 2025” (January 23, 2025). The future head of the German government presented a particularly ambitious and carefully developed foreign policy and security program. He particularly underlined the need to re-establish a relationship of trust with Germany’s two most important neighbors: France and Poland. With regard to Poland, it was first and foremost a matter of putting an end to the “mutism between Berlin and Warsaw” and of rebuilding the bilateral relationship on a common basis, with respect, empathy and the awareness that the two countries shared a past heavily marked by history. Merz also wanted to involve Poland more in European affairs as a leading actor. The speech was also an opportunity to emphasize the symbolic significance of the new location of the Polish embassy in Berlin, in the “political heart” of the German capital. Returning to the historical foundations of the bilateral relationship, he finally recalled the German-Polish good neighborliness treaty of 1991 and proposed to do so evolve towards a German-Polish friendship treaty.

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Hans Stark: The greatness and misery of the Franco-German relationship

The beginnings were promising. When Friedrich Merz assumed the chancellorship in the spring of 2025, he seemed to be following in the footsteps of Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Kohl. During his campaign, he gave two speeches on German foreign policy – in December 2024 at the Federal Academy of Security Policy and then, in January 2025, before the Körber Foundation. These two speeches clearly showed his desire to strengthen the EU and to consolidate the Franco-German tandem in a context of geopolitical tensions with China, Russia and the United States Emmanuel Macron welcomed these two speeches and, shortly after Merz’s election, invited him to his summer residence at Fort de Brégançon. (August 2025). Added to this were numerous crisis meetings, notably with Donald Trump who, after his return to the White House, seemed ready to hand over Ukraine to Russian interests. the British Prime Minister within the framework of the E3 format, they displayed remarkable cohesion and thus managed to avoid the worst.

The culmination of this cooperation was the opening of a Franco-German dialogue on nuclear deterrence. For decades, Berlin had refused any exchange of this nature. Today, while the guarantee given by Article 5 of the NATO treaty is increasingly uncertain, Germany has opened itself to discussion. Emmanuel Macron, however, did not propose to Berlin a “nuclear guarantee” in the strict sense of the term. Nor is it a question of replacing the “nuclear participation” mechanism existing within NATO. The French president does not have a political majority favorable to a development of this nature.

Given its current capabilities, and in return for a strengthening of the conventional efforts of its partners, France could however consider the deployment of airborne nuclear assets on the eastern flank of NATO, in a logic of collective defense. Since Friedrich Merz gave new impetus to the Turning pointGermany appears particularly well placed to support this development. This would certainly arouse hostility from Moscow but it remains realistic and also corresponds to Berlin’s strategic interests. France is also faced with a more constrained budgetary situation and cannot, unlike Germany, devote 5% of its GDP to defense, which limits its room for maneuver.

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Hans Stark is professor of German civilization at Sorbonne University. He is advisor on Franco-German relations at Ifri.

Małgorzata Gemen is a lawyer and heads the Berlin office of the Polish Institute of International Affairs (PISM).

 

• This article is available on the journal’s website dokdoc.eu.