The End of Year Assessment
As 2025 drew to a close, Germany found itself in an unusual position: politically stable on paper, yet profoundly uncertain about its direction. The year began with Friedrich Merz ascending to the chancellorship after a long wait in the political wilderness, promising decisive leadership and a return to traditional conservative values. By December, the assessment was more complicated.
The year-end political discourse revealed a peculiar German condition—endless discussion about problems everyone agrees exist, yet no coherent action to address them. The bundespräsident’s Christmas address and Merz’s year-end speech both acknowledged challenges: economic stagnation, demographic decline, security threats. But somewhere between diagnosis and treatment, German politics seemed to lose its way.
Journalism, too, struggled with its role. The necessity of maintaining critical distance during festive seasons clashed with the gravity of topics demanding serious attention. The result was a kind of performative seriousness—grave tones discussing grave matters, yet somehow failing to break through to substantive debate about solutions.
Ukraine: The Belated Reckoning
Nothing illustrated Germany’s strategic confusion more than the Ukraine debate. As the Trump administration unveiled its 28-point plan, German political discourse underwent a striking shift—suddenly, negotiation became thinkable. After nearly three years of binary thinking that dismissed any talk of diplomatic solutions as capitulation, the conversation opened.
But this shift exposed an uncomfortable truth: Germany had spent precious little time seriously engaging with Vladimir Putin’s actual objectives. Colonel Markus Reisner’s military assessments painted a grim picture of the front-line situation, discussing scenarios ranging from a Finnish model of armed neutrality to a Korean partition. Meanwhile, figures like Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann continued advocating for military strength and Taurus cruise missile deliveries—positions that increasingly seemed divorced from battlefield realities.
The Ukrainian crisis revealed Germany’s deeper problem: an inability to think strategically about power. Moral positions substituted for strategic analysis. Declarations of solidarity replaced hard calculations about achievable outcomes. The result was a policy that satisfied Germany’s self-image as a responsible European power while accomplishing little toward actually ending the conflict.
The Bürgergeld Pantomime
Domestic policy offered no more clarity. The reform of Bürgergeld—Germany’s basic welfare payment—into the „New Basic Security“ system demonstrated politics as pure theater. The CDU pushed for stricter sanctions and tougher conditions, framing the debate in terms of „feelings“ rather than fiscal reality.
Experts like Stefan Sell pointed out what should have been obvious: these reforms would generate minimal budgetary savings. The entire exercise was about signaling—demonstrating toughness, asserting state authority, performing decisiveness for voters anxious about social cohesion. The policy debate descended into „feelings politics,“ where the appearance of action mattered more than actual effects.
Meanwhile, the practice of paying housing benefits directly to landlords revealed the true architecture of the welfare state—not a safety net for individuals but a subsidy system for property owners. This structural reality went largely undiscussed, buried beneath rhetorical battles about personal responsibility and work incentives.
Merz: One Year In
Friedrich Merz entered office promising managerial competence and clear-eyed realism. After one year, the verdict was mixed at best. His foreign policy positioning proved particularly revealing—and alarming. When confronted with Trump’s „America First“ agenda, Merz declared this acceptable, arguing Germany should focus on its own interests rather than trying to preserve a liberal international order.
Political commentators like Robin Alexander recognized this as potentially fatal for European cohesion. If Germany—Europe’s largest economy and traditionally its anchor of multilateral cooperation—embraced nationalist retrenchment, what hope remained for collective European action?
Yet Merz’s position reflected a deeper truth about contemporary German conservatism: it had no coherent vision for Germany’s role in a post-American international order. The old transatlantic certainties were dead, but nothing had replaced them. So Merz defaulted to a kind of reactive pragmatism—accepting American disengagement while offering no alternative framework for European security or prosperity.
Domestically, Merz navigated the CDU’s internal contradictions with mixed success. The party’s relationship with the AfD remained officially one of strict separation, yet upcoming state elections in the East promised to test this firewall. As the far right gained strength, the CDU faced an impossible choice: maintain its cordon sanitaire and risk permanent exclusion from power in several states, or compromise its democratic principles for governing majorities.
Merz’s leadership style—that of the corporate manager thrust into politics—proved ill-suited to these dilemmas. He understood processes, balance sheets, organizational charts. He was less adept at the political arts: building coalitions, managing symbols, articulating compelling visions of the future.
The Elite Discourse
Perhaps nothing better captured Germany’s disconnect than the year-end media roundtables. Germanys most successful podcast hosts Anne Will, Robin Alexander (Machtwechsel), and Ulf Buermeyer (Lage der Natuion) discussed the „epoch-breaking“ changes Trump would bring. The discussion centered on whether Germany should reintroduce conscription—a proposal increasingly divorced from both military realities and the actual concerns of young Germans.
Critics noted how thoroughly this elite discourse had separated from lived experience. While prominent commentators debated grand strategic questions, younger generations faced housing crises, precarious employment, and climate anxiety. The gap between what occupied Germany’s opinion-making class and what worried actual citizens had never been wider.
This disconnect extended to economic policy. While DAX companies posted record profits—earned primarily abroad—Germany entered its third consecutive year of recession. Energy-intensive industries relocated production. Supply chains that had sustained the Mittelstand for generations began to fray. Yet the policy response remained trapped in obsolete frameworks, with government-commissioned growth agendas that ignored contemporary economic realities.
The Year’s Verdict
2025 will be remembered as the year Germany confronted the gap between its self-conception and its actual capabilities. Under Merz, the country achieved stability without direction, management without vision, continuity without purpose.
The problems were clear enough: economic transformation required by climate change and digitalization, demographic pressures mounting inexorably, security threats multiplying as American guarantees evaporated, social cohesion fraying under the pressure of inequality and cultural change.
What remained unclear was whether German democracy possessed the capacity to address these challenges. The machinery of deliberation continued to operate, producing endless analyses and position papers. But somewhere between identification and action, between diagnosis and treatment, the process seemed to stall.
As Germans prepared to enter 2026, they did so with a chancellor who exemplified both the strengths and limitations of their political culture: competent, serious, well-intentioned—yet somehow unable to articulate a compelling vision of where Germany should go, or how it might get there. The year ahead would test whether managerial adequacy could suffice in an age demanding transformative leadership.
Germansplainer 
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