Keeping It Up? Where Friedrich Merz Will Take Germany’s Foreign Policy

... are formally in favor of maintaining the weiter so (“keep it up”) principle in German foreign policy. However, this stance is more an element of positioning themselves in the German political space than a well-thought-out strategy. The Bundestag elections coincided with changes in the dynamics of the Ukraine crisis, and the new German government will have to take new realities into account in its actions. The prevailing sentiment among analysts, both in Russia and abroad, is that Friedrich Merz will pursue a hard line on Russia. His campaign rhetoric reinforces this impression, as the CDU/CSU candidate threatened Moscow with increased support for Ukraine up to the point of supplying Taurus missiles to the Ukrainian military. Furthermore,...