AFTER DONALD TRUMP´S AMERICA FIRST, ANGELA MERKEL´S GERMANY FIRST / THE FINANCIAL TIMES OP EDITORIAL

After Donald Trump’s America First, Angela Merkel’s Germany First

The chancellor still has a chance to show that national and mutual interest can merge

Philip Stephens



Donald Trump and Angela Merkel are meeting this week at the White House. Like most Europeans, the German chancellor struggles to disguise her disdain for the US president’s America First nationalism. Yet in Berlin Ms Merkel’s coalition is humming its own parochial tunes. Eurozone reform? Too expensive. A bigger contribution to European security? Politically off limits. It all begins to sound like, well, Germany First.

Mr Trump exults in the elevation of narrow national interests over global rules and institutions.

Everything is a zero-sum game. He has disowned the Paris climate change accord and repudiated multilateral trade deals. He may soon blow up the international nuclear deal with Iran. Across the Atlantic, Germany speaks the language of a devoted multilateralist and guardian of the liberal international order. No one is keener on rules.

Leaders prioritise national interests. That is what they are elected for. The gap lies between those such as Mr Trump, who think in terms of might-is-right winners and hapless losers, and those who spy a landscape of swings and roundabouts — a positive-sum game in which national and mutual interests can be aligned. Ms Merkel champions this second group.

She has good reason. Germany has been the big beneficiary of European integration. Sure, it writes sizeable cheques to Brussels and underwrites financial risk in the eurozone. But look at the rewards. The common market was the route back to political respectability and economic recovery. The EU provided the framework for orderly reunification. And the euro has been the foundation for German prosperity.

The economy is booming. Growth and exports are strong, unemployment at record lows, and inflation barely visible. The public coffers — federal, state and municipal — are overflowing. Here, ironically, is the problem. Mr Trump exploits the grievances of poor white America; Ms Merkel’s parochialism reflects an unwillingness to disturb Germany’s present good fortune.

The outcome of September’s election was widely seen as troublesome. Ms Merkel’s Christian Democrats and its Bavarian sister party, the CSU, lost votes. So did the mainstream Social Democrats. The winners were the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the far-left Die Linke. It took months for Ms Merkel to assemble another coalition with the SPD.

For all that, Germans got more or less what they wanted. The experienced and trusted Ms Merkel returned to the chancellery, but this time with constraints. The march into parliament of the AfD strengthened her party’s conservatives. They push back against any temptation to show solidarity with weaker EU partners by deepening economic integration. And the result rules out a repetition of her decision in 2015 to open the borders to refugees. Ms Merkel did the right thing, most Germans say. But she must not do it again.

For many years Berlin complained that Ms Merkel did not have a serious partner in Paris. The old alliance — the Franco-German locomotive some called it — had broken down. President Nicolas Sarkozy was too unpredictable; his successor, François Hollande, paralysed by the office. If only Germany could share leadership, the lament went, the EU could be overhauled.

Well, in Emmanuel Macron, Berlin has just the politician it asked for. In the process of smashing the old political establishment, the French president has done a rare thing. He campaigned unabashedly for domestic reform and has lived up to his manifesto. He also defied the xenophobia of the far-right National Front by writing an elegant hymn to Europe. And the Germans? They are gripped by a sudden nostalgia.

Last year, I spent some time in Berlin as a visiting fellow at the Bosch Academy. Over and over again I heard policymakers warning against being misled by Mr Macron. The president was wrapping French interests in a European flag, they said — as if Berlin would never dream of such a thing. Surely, this is the essential purpose of the EU — the process of merging national and mutual interests. Negotiation is about finding the right point of compromise so that everyone can claim victory.

But no. Mr Macron’s plans for a eurozone budget and finance minister are too ambitious in Berlin’s eyes. They would promote moral hazard among fiscally irresponsible southern Europeans. As for completing the banking union, why should German taxpayers be at risk of being asked to bail out Italian banks? And so the objections run on. So much for solidarity.

Ms Merkel, one supposes, would say she is hemmed in by circumstance. True, as far as it goes. But here she is in her fourth and what must be her final term as chancellor. The economy will never be in better shape. If ever there was a moment to invest political capital — to show the leadership that takes risks — it has surely arrived.

A German friend, a shrewd observer of politics, tells me that the country is doing so well that it cannot see the world through the lenses of its neighbours. A harsher judgment would stir in a fistful of sanctimony — Germany is the sole author of its good fortune, so if others have problems they must look to themselves for a remedy. Now there is a worldview that Mr Trump would applaud. Ms Merkel still has time to prove him wrong.