BRUSSELS (AFP) – Germans head to the polls tomorrow in an election that has been impatiently awaited in Brussels, where many hope Berlin can swiftly return to play a driving role in European Union (EU) affairs as the bloc faces a string of crises.
Already suffering from lacklustre economic growth and competitiveness, the EU has been rocked by United States (US) President Donald Trump threatening a trade war and reaching out over European leaders’ heads to settle the war in Ukraine.
“We are sometimes afraid of German leadership,” said a European diplomat. “But it is difficult to live without it”.
Incertitude in Germany has added to months of political turmoil in France, where a weakened President Emmanuel Macron in December appointed his fourth prime minister within a year.
The Franco-German engine normally credited with driving the EU” has not been able to work” and take “major decisions” at a time where “it is more necessary than ever”, said Yann Wernert, an analyst at the Jacques Delors Institute.
“We don’t see much German commitment in current EU legislation,” lamented another diplomat.
The vacuum has been partially filled by others. But the absence has been felt.
“Can the EU act without Germany and France? In case of an emergency this would be possible, but it is better to act with France and Germany,” said a third diplomat.
Tomorrow’s vote will not immediately solve the problem, as Germany may not have a new government until the spring.
The confident frontrunner Friedrich Merz has said he’s aiming for an Easter deadline. But arduous coalition negotiations tend to drag on for weeks if not months in the country, spelling long stretches of political paralysis.
Questions about the shape of a future coalition government are likely to slow down key legislative projects also at the European level, on anything from migration to defense funding and climate change, said Wernert.
“All Europe is watching this election,” said European lawmaker with the Greens Daniel Freund lamenting the current “lack of movement”.
Some of his colleagues worry about the ripple effect the vote could have on political balances at the European Parliament.
Merz’s conservative CDU-CSU alliance belongs to the largest Parliamentary group, the EPP, which currently shapes the chamber’s agenda with support from a loose alliance of centrists, social democrats and greens.
But led by Manfred Weber, a German, the EPP has occasionally sided with the far right over the past year.
The same tactic was used by the CDU/CSU, which last month passed a motion calling for an immigration crackdown with the support of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) in a taboo-breaking manoeuvre.
“For me, the real question is to what extent what happened in Germany will have an impact on the outcome of the elections and what lessons EPP representatives will draw from it,” said head of the centrist Renew group Valerie Hayer.
“Will they say… it was a losing strategy or, on the contrary, a winning one?”
If the so-called “firewall” barring cooperation with the extreme right “breaks down” in Germany “it will be very unfeasible to have it implemented here”, added a European lawmaker with the far-right Patriots group Dane Anders Vistisen.
