Germany after the ‘Zeitenwende’
22/08/2026
In his March 24 speech, on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the restoration of the Auswärtiges Amt (AA) – the Federal Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany – the country’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, referred to the “strategic challenges” the AA had to face in 1951, “by no means minor.” Of the “four constants” that, according to Steinmeier, occupied West German foreign policy during the Cold War period –first, the division of Germany and its overcoming; second, integration into the West; third, European integration; and, in fourth place, the relationship and dialogue with the East of our continent– only three have been achieved. The one that remains pending, that of European integration, is today “even more important”, according to Steinmeier, since relations with both Washington and Moscow are experiencing “an unprecedented rupture”. In the case of the United States, although the West remains “a valuable normative ideal, it currently does not exist as a political reality.”
Steinmeier did not sugarcoat Germany’s situation in this context: “The world around us seems to become a bit more dangerous and more brutal with each passing day. At the very least, more irrational,“ he said. ”And just as the international order we defend disintegrates day by day, it seems that we, Germany, find ourselves day by day increasingly pushed to the margins of world events.” In the face of this, “German foreign policy is facing a fundamental reorientation: the world in our heads must be mapped anew.”
The change of an era
The use of an impersonal construction served Steinmeier to diplomatically sidestep the question of responsibility: who is to carry out this mapping—and answer to the public—and how it should be done. It is no small matter, since it is indisputable that the past five years have brought about a major shift in German foreign policy, and the country finds itself at a turning point that could mean a new fit in a new Europe within a new world order in transformation or, conversely, a loss of influence within a more irrelevant Europe within this same new world order that, in any case, will continue to be in transformation.
The economic model—a system based fundamentally on manufacturing for export to generate surplus value and wage stagnation—allowed Germany to enjoy a dominant political and economic position in the European Union, as was evident during the debt crisis, particularly in Southern Europe. As a result, the reforms this model required for the German economy to modernise and remain competitive were repeatedly postponed. The Covid crisis, which shook global production and distribution chains, exposed its shortcomings first, and the hot phase of the war in Ukraine, beginning with the Russian full-scale invasion in February 2022, as well as its political and economic consequences, accelerated its decline, forcing the German foreign policy to adapt.
The keyword has been ‘Zeitenwende’ (‘turning point’). It was used by then-Chancellor Olaf Scholz in a speech to the Bundestag on Sunday, February 27, 2022, three days after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which he described as a “tipping point”, and in which he also announced an increase in military spending with an extraordinary fund, the decision to help Ukraine by sending weaponry so it could defend itself, and the commitment to exceed the 2% of GDP for defence required by NATO. Additionally, he also committed on behalf of the government to reduce dependence on Russian energy and to join international sanctions against Moscow.
Russia: from energy as an understanding common ground to public hostility
Relations with Russia have always held a special place in German foreign policy for historical and economic reasons that need not be detailed, as they are well known. The war in Ukraine and the explosion of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline in September 2022 –the authorship of which is currently under investigation by the German justice system– have definitively buried the pragmatic relationship that until then Berlin had maintained with governments of different colours with Russia, considered a key trading partner in the supply of energy –mainly natural gas– for industrial and domestic consumption in Germany.
The successive packages of sanctions against Russia approved by the European Union and the Kremlin’s asymmetric response have created a significant gap in the economy that both Scholz’s tripartite government with the Greens and Liberals and Friedrich Merz’s Grand Coalition government have sought to fill with liquefied natural gas mainly from the US and Qatar. However, this has been an ill-fated operation due to Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election, first, and the war in Iran, later, which have made it clear that the dependence—or interdependence – of Russian gas has been replaced by another no less unstable one, without the country having had time to diversify either its import portfolio or its energy production sources, or even to maintain diplomatic channels for a potential resumption of Russian natural gas imports should a ceasefire in Ukraine be reached.
China: between distrust and cooperation
If ours is “the Asian century,” then relations with China are, therefore, a matter of first order in any foreign policy. If Berlin has strained its relationship with Moscow, with Beijing it is walking a tightrope, seeking a balance between maintaining cooperation that is essential in various areas—China is Germany’s most important trading partner, with a trade volume of €251.8 billion—and avoiding strategic dependence. This ambivalence is nowhere clearer than in the automotive sector, which depends on importing technological components for production and, at the same time, has lost its competitive edge to the Chinese industry in electric cars.
The European Union’s decision to postpone the ban on combustion engines until 2035 under pressure from the industry is the clearest sign of this commercial defeat. The main argument put forward by the sector’s major companies and the media attributes Chinese firms’ advantage to state subsidies. This argument, however, overlooks that this same sector enjoys considerable public support in Germany and sidelines its specific problems, in particular, according to experts, a business strategy that has not allocated sufficient resources to technological innovation.
This commercial competition is shifting to the African continent, where China and Germany are seeking to intensify their bilateral relations with various states for energy exports—not only fossil fuels, but also for the production of so-called “green hydrogen”—and to secure key raw materials for industrial production. China, for example, produces 80% of the world’s tungsten, a raw material that, unlike other metals, cannot be recycled and is essential for numerous industrial processes carried out in Germany.
Strategic autonomy as a goal?
If the war in Ukraine was the catalyst for the rearmament policy, Trump’s second term—with its repeated public pressures to increase military spending and threats to abandon NATO and economic and military support for Ukraine (which would force the European Union to bear the cost of both alone), and even annexing the autonomous territory of Greenland by force—has been its catalyst. At the time of writing this article, the latest incident has been the announcement of the withdrawal of 5,000 U.S. soldiers stationed in German territory, a measure that Berlin has downplayed. However, such a rearmament policy in the current political and economic context can only be carried out with cuts to other budget areas, which entails greater internal political instability, as the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) is currently capitalising on the discontent and is already the leading political force in the polls, with a lead of more than five points over Merz’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU). In March, the Bundestag approved excluding military spending – the declared military budget for 2026 is €108 billion, greater than the combined total of the United Kingdom and France, or one in every six euros of the federal budget—from the debt ceiling that applies to other budget items and other related measures, such as the reintroduction of compulsory military service, are equally unpopular, and, although the CDU is feeling the strain, its coalition partner, the Social Democratic Party of Germany, is feeling it even more (SPD)—which already bears the burden of its traditional electoral base eroding due to its political commitments and the country’s domestic economic situation—complicating the country’s future governability.
Otherwise, the German industrial base could prove to be ill-equipped to take on this challenge for the reasons previously cited for the automotive sector (limited flexibility for adaptation and lack of innovation): the flagship products of the German defence industry are, besides light weapons, tanks, the importance of which on the battlefield has diminished in the wars in Ukraine and Iran due to missile launches and the use of drones. As a U.S. journalist recently wrote about “Anglo-Gaullism”, it is impossible to undertake the task of emancipating oneself from the U.S. and modernising the armed forces without a solid industrial base, relying solely on an increase in military spending. If Germany also wants to be more resilient, it must therefore diversify not only its energy import portfolio but also its supply chains, thereby reducing risk in an increasingly unpredictable international context and simultaneously strengthening the domestic economy.
It is, indeed, very difficult to achieve strategic autonomy—if one considers it a desirable objective and not merely a temporary slogan—if there is not a greater effort at European-level coordination in the joint production of military supplies, which currently clashes with the narrower national interests of each state’s military industry, in turn conditioned by the geostrategic interests of each member state, which, as is well known, do not always coincide. At this point, there is even an ideological factor at play: a not insignificant portion of the German political class was intellectually trained in transatlantic institutions or steeped in that ideology, and will not easily break away from it, if ever. However, the more and more voices that consider strategic autonomy a necessity, the temptation to wait for the Republican Party to lose power in the U.S. in the next election cycle and for a return to the status quo ante to occur is still there, and it acts as an inertial force in a changing world that will never be the same again. In the absence of a defence association, the same mistakes made during the debt crisis a decade ago will be repeated, and instead of resolving a crisis, the conditions for the next one will be created. Right now, all balances are at stake.
Àngel Ferrero is a Catalan journalist and translator specialised in German politics. He holds a degree in Audiovisual Communication from the Autonomous University of Barcelona.
The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors alone. They do not represent the views and opinions of the CGI or its collaborators. The designations employed in this publication and the presentation of the material therein do not imply any expression of opinion whatsoever on the part of the CGI concerning the legal status of any country, area or territory, its authorities or concerning the delimitation of its borders.
