Germany: Time to talk peace with Putin, says Scholz rival

The frontrunner to become Germany’s next chancellor has suggested it is time to seek a peace deal with Russia over Ukraine.

Friedrich Merz, leader of the German Christian Democrats, in Berlin. Picture: Getty Images.

The frontrunner to become Germany’s next chancellor has suggested it is time to seek a peace deal with Russia over Ukraine.

In the past, Friedrich Merz, the leader of the centre-right opposition, had repeatedly pushed Berlin to provide more military aid to Ukraine.

MPs from his party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), have at times described Olaf Scholz, the Chancellor, as a “risk to national security” because of what they depicted as his excessive caution and vacillation. Mr Merz had argued that Germany should supply “every means” to help Ukraine win the war.

On Sunday, however, Mr Merz indicated that he would prefer to see an armistice. “We must see that we open up possibilities for how to bring this conflict to an end at some point,” he told the public broadcaster ZDF. Mr Merz also seemed to strike a more conciliatory tone on Germany’s military support for Ukraine.

Berlin has provided or promised military assistance worth €34bn (54bn), making it Ukraine’s largest Western backer after the United States.

Mr Merz said that Berlin had to “keep on helping” Kyiv and praised President Emmanuel Macron of France for suggesting that NATO members could deploy troops on training missions in Ukraine. Yet Mr Merz also moderated his language on military aid, declining to repeat his earlier demands for deliveries of Taurus cruise missiles.

“I support the decisions the government has made on this,” he said. “I believe we did too little, too late. I always said we should have done more at the start.”

National polls put the CDU and its Bavarian affiliate on course to emerge as the largest political bloc in the Bundestag at the general election next year. They won first place in the European parliamentary election this month.

That means Mr Merz is in pole position to claim the chancellorship as long as he can hold off his rivals within the party. However, the CDU is under heavy pressure in three eastern German states that will elect new governments in September.

At present the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which supports reconciliation with Moscow, holds a polling lead in all three regions.

A series of defeats for the CDU would not only weaken Mr Merz’s position within the party but also force it to build local coalitions with other movements that want peace with Russia, such as the populist left-wing Sahra Wagenknecht alliance.

Surveys show that nearly half of eastern German voters want Berlin to scale back its arms shipments to Ukraine. Most in western Germany would like to see the shipments either increased or sustained at current levels.

Just over half of Germans believe that the country should put more diplomatic effort into ending the war but large majorities also doubt that this outcome is possible and regard President Vladimir Putin as an “unserious” partner for negotiations.

These trends are increasingly reflected in the main parties’ campaign strategies.

Mr Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) made prominent use of the slogan “secure peace” in a doomed effort to win back public support in the European elections.

In March Rolf Mutzenich, the SPD’s leader in the Bundestag, argued that Germany needed to identify ways of “freezing” the war in Ukraine. He was heavily criticised for this by the CDU, which accused Mr Mutzenich and his party of slipping back into their old “romanticism” about Russia.

THE TIMES