It has taken Germany a frustratingly long six months from the collapse of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government to a snap election to Tuesday’s swearing-in of Friedrich Merz as Scholz’s successor. Even then, it took Merz an unusual two rounds of voting in the German parliament before he finally took the helm.

With war raging in Ukraine, almost daily Russian threats against Europe, and deepening trans-Atlantic rifts under U.S. President Donald Trump, Merz has promised to end the long paralysis in German foreign policy. Most importantly, he seeks to accomplish the Zeitenwende—or change of eras—in security and defense that Scholz declared but did little to follow up on.

It has taken Germany a frustratingly long six months from the collapse of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government to a snap election to Tuesday’s swearing-in of Friedrich Merz as Scholz’s successor. Even then, it took Merz an unusual two rounds of voting in the German parliament before he finally took the helm.

With war raging in Ukraine, almost daily Russian threats against Europe, and deepening trans-Atlantic rifts under U.S. President Donald Trump, Merz has promised to end the long paralysis in German foreign policy. Most importantly, he seeks to accomplish the Zeitenwende—or change of eras—in security and defense that Scholz declared but did little to follow up on.

The new government promises strategic coherence after years of fragmentation. The choices for key personnel and institutional reforms announced so far suggest that, for the first time in years, German foreign policy may speak with a single coherent voice rather than a cacophony of squabbling coalition parties and factions. We will have to see how it works out in practice, but it’s hard to overstate the significance of this break with past German foreign-policy governance.

Merz has deliberately centralized foreign and security policy coordination in the chancellery. To start, he has done away with the long-standing tradition of giving the Foreign Office to the main coalition partner, a practice that baked in foreign-policy dysfunction by setting up a separate power base held by a different political party. Now, for the first time since 1966, the chancellor and foreign minister will be from the same party—in this case, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). New Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul is a party loyalist who will ensure alignment rather than competition with the chancellor.

Within the chancellery—where all important foreign-policy decisions are made—Merz has appointed close confidants to key posts: Jacob Schrot, a trusted trans-Atlanticist, as head of the newly created German National Security Council; veteran diplomat Günter Sautter as foreign-policy lead; and Michael Clauss to handle European Union affairs, which Merz wants to make a core strategic portfolio and to which Clauss brings credibility and experience, including significant work on China.

This consolidation........

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