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.
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 as 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.
German officials appear cautiously optimistic that Mr. Merz will have a successful, brief first trip to Washington.
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 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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