Germany’s
Leader Heads to the Oval Office, Hoping to Pass Trump’s Test
Friedrich
Merz is seeking to reassert his country’s role on the global stage, in part by
building rapport with President Trump.
Jim
TankersleyChristopher F. Schuetze
By Jim
Tankersley and Christopher F. Schuetze
Reporting
from Berlin
June 5, 2025
Updated 1:44
a.m. ET
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/05/world/europe/merz-germany-trump-visit.html
When
Germany’s newly installed chancellor, Friedrich Merz, arrives at the White
House on Thursday he is hoping to position himself as the most influential
German leader on the world stage since the heyday of Angela Merkel.
Mr. Merz,
who took office in early May, is jockeying to lead Europe on international
trade, security and the war in Ukraine. He aspires to be a steadying force and
to make Germany indispensable to Europe’s effort to stand on its own feet.
But first,
he and his aides know, Mr. Merz will have to get past an on-camera Oval Office
performance with President Trump. The president and his administration have
shown a special animus toward Germany among the European nations Mr. Trump sees
more as competitors than allies.
Mr. Merz, a
center-right politician and wealthy former lawyer, hopes that he and the
president will speak the same language. He has spent much of his first month on
the job rehearsing for the test, mindful of the dressings-down some other
foreign leaders have received in the Oval, including President Volodymyr
Zelensky of Ukraine and President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa.
Late on
Wednesday, Trump officials threw him a curveball: They moved the Oval meeting
to the start of the visit, before a working lunch. German officials had
expected the lunch to come first, offering the leaders a chance to hash through
any disagreements in private before the cameras rolled.
The Merz
team knows how important the first meeting between the leaders is. Mr. Merz’s
aides, who briefed reporters in advance of the visit, have spoken with advisers
of other leaders who made the pilgrimage to Washington to ask about their
experiences. Mr. Merz has spoken with many of those leaders himself, including
a recent call with Mr. Ramaphosa.
At the White
House, Mr. Merz will attempt to keep Mr. Trump engaged in America’s
longstanding commitment to defending Europe in the face of an increasingly
aggressive Russia — even though some in Mr. Trump’s administration have mused
about pulling back.
He will
similarly seek to keep Mr. Trump focused on defending Ukraine in its war with
Russia and pushing for new, coordinated economic penalties directed at Moscow,
including large new penalties on any countries that buy Russian oil or gas.
Not least,
Mr. Merz will try to defuse the president’s threat to impose high tariffs on
imports from Germany and the rest of the European Union as soon as July. Mr.
Merz is likely to stress the degree to which a trade war between America and
Europe could rebound to the advantage of China, say his aides.
They believe
the most important thing Mr. Merz will carry to Washington is a policy victory.
German lawmakers recently moved to obliterate their hallowed borrowing limits
and allow the country to spend 5 percent of its annual economic product on
national defense.
Though the
money has not yet been appropriated, and German officials have suggested a wide
range of spending will count toward it — including areas that are not direct
spending on weapons or soldiers — the commitment is exactly what Mr. Trump has
been calling for from Germany and other NATO members.
“Merz is
going to Washington to show that Germany can move the trans-Atlantic
relationship forward now that he has committed to spending significantly on
defense,” said Sudha David-Wilp, the Berlin-based regional director of the
German Marshall Fund, a research organization.
Mr. Merz is
aware there is always the potential the chancellor could walk into a hostile
reception. He criticized President Trump’s commitment to American democracy
during his election campaign, and the Trump administration has made no secret
of its preference for more like-minded political allies on Europe’s hard right.
Vice
President JD Vance in a speech in Munich this winter assailed German
restrictions on extreme political speech, which have been in place for decades
in an effort to prevent a repeat of the nation’s Nazi past. He also urged
German leaders to drop their so-called “firewall” that prevents mainstream
parties from including the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, in
government.
Mr. Vance
and other administration officials like the AfD’s hard line against immigrants,
but the party has been officially labeled extreme by German intelligence and
many mainstream politicians have sought to ban the AfD from German elections.
A White
House official said on Wednesday that Mr. Trump was likely to raise freedom of
speech issues with Mr. Merz and suggest that Germany’s commitment to it had
deteriorated. The official also said Mr. Trump would likely discuss the need
for Germany to solidify its plans to increase military spending, the need for
continued Russia-Ukraine negotiations and the administration’s desire for the
European Union to reduce trade barriers with the United States.
Mr. Merz
spent a significant amount of time in the United States while working as a
lawyer for a Chicago law firm. Unlike previous chancellors, he speaks English
well and easily. The translator who usually accompanies the chancellor on such
trips will stay home, according to government officials.
The
chancellor has already had several telephone conversations with Mr. Trump and
generally the men appear to have a good rapport. The two leaders have
reportedly exchanged telephone numbers and have been sending texts, addressing
each other by their first name, a departure for the usually rather formal
German leader. Mr. Merz was set to spend Wednesday night at Blair House, the
official state guest residence across the street from the White House.
Mr. Merz
also invited Mr. Trump to Kallstadt, the village from where the American
President’s paternal grandparents emigrated from in the late 19th Century. In
the German leader’s telling, Mr. Trump accepted, but nobody on the German side
expects the visit to happen soon. There has not been a formal acceptance from
the White House.
The German
team has also put some thought into the gifts Mr. Merz is bringing, though they
won’t say what they are. (The bar is high: British Prime Minister Keir Starmer
delivered an invitation to visit King Charles. Qatari officials gifted Mr.
Trump a luxury jet.) On Monday, a government spokesman told curious reporters
that they would have to wait until Thursday to see what Mr. Merz has brought
Mr. Trump.
“You can be
just as surprised as the U.S. president,” Stefan Kornelius, the spokesman, said
in a news conference.
The German
news media are intently focused on the visit. After a difficult start that saw
Mr. Merz require an unprecedented second vote in parliament to be elected, Mr.
Merz has spent much of last month traveling.
In his first
weeks on the job, he flew to Paris, Brussels, Warsaw, Helsinki and beyond
seeking to rebuild alliances, but none of those trips carried the same stakes.
His absences
have earned him some media complaints, but they have also coincided with a
slight rise in voter approval. While Mr. Merz’s party was briefly tied with the
far-right AfD, his party has gained over the last month and it now sits up to
five percent ahead of the AfD, according to recent polling.
That could
strengthen Mr. Merz in the eyes of the Trump team. So could his
administration’s decision to continue a crackdown on immigration, and mostly a
ignore court ruling that sought to block a key part of it.
Other top
officials in Mr. Merz’s government have criticized the United States for its
pullback on foreign aid and general retreat from global cooperation.
In an
interview this week at the Hamburg Sustainability Conference, focused on those
international efforts, Reem Alabali-Radovan, the new German minister for
economic cooperation and development, said America’s pullback on international
assistance had complicated attempts to solve global problems.
For Germany
and its allies, she said, “it is very clear that we cannot cope with all that
is missing from the U.S. budget.”
Asked what
she hoped Mr. Merz told Mr. Trump in Washington, she replied: “We need a strong
partnership with the U.S. in the multilateral system.”
David E.
Sanger and Jonathan Swan contributed reporting from Washington.
Jim
Tankersley is the Berlin bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of
Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
Christopher
F. Schuetze is a reporter for The Times based in Berlin, covering politics,
society and culture in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
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