Simon Gros

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What appears under the title “Special Address by Friedrich Merz, Federal Chancellor of Germany | WEF Annual Meeting 2026” is an event that stages, in compressed form, a particular European self-description under conditions of accelerated geopolitical drift: a self-description that tries to hold together, within a single rhetorical economy, the language of rules and partnerships with a newly foregrounded vocabulary of power, strength, and defense investment. Convened within the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos-Klosters (a setting the Forum itself frames as an institutional space for “public-private cooperation”), and formatted as a moderator introduction followed by a prepared address and a short Q&A, the event’s distinctive value as an object of study lies in how it attempts to convert a diagnosis of “great power politics” into an internally coherent program of European agency while remaining answerable to alliance commitments, market-facing credibility, and the procedural texture of EU decision-making.

Brende’s introduction performs the first decisive act of problem-construction. He positions Merz as “Mr. Chancellor” returning to Davos with a changed predicate: previously present “not as chancellor,” now present “heading the largest economy in Europe.” In doing so, he installs an implicit standard of responsibility: Germany as “Europe’s economic engine” carries “particular responsibility” for “shaping the continent’s future.” The temporal marker “you assumed office in May” compresses Merz’s chancellorship into the image of an inauguration coinciding with “profound change,” and Brende enumerates that change across several registers: “geopolitical tensions,” “fragmenting” trade, “urgent” security, and technological reshaping “at remarkable speed.” This enumeration is not a neutral catalog; it selects the axes on which the chancellor is expected to demonstrate intelligibility and command. It also sets up a double expectation: clarity of diagnosis and operability of response. Merz’s later insistence on “cleareyed realism” can be read as an uptake of this pre-installed demand for epistemic sobriety, with the important caveat that what counts as “realism” is itself an object of rhetorical contestation inside the event’s own economy.

Brende then adds a second layer: he names “important signals” sent “since taking office”—a “shift in fiscal policy,” “significant investments” in defense and infrastructure, and “a more active German role” internationally. The introduction thus offers an interpretive key before the chancellor speaks: the address is to be heard as the articulation, justification, and amplification of a policy turn already narratively stabilized as a set of “signals.” This matters because it places Merz under a quasi-demonstrative burden: his speech must retroactively make these “signals” intelligible as components of a coherent orientation rather than as discrete moves. Brende’s citation of Mario Draghi’s warning—“without bold action, Europe risks a slow agony”—further intensifies the demand. The phrase “slow agony” functions in the introduction as a compressed philosophy of time: decline as a temporally extended, internally normalizing process, a suffering that becomes habitual, and therefore a condition that cannot be answered by incrementalism. Even if Merz never repeats this wording, the introduction makes it available as a background pressure against which later appeals to “emergency break for bureaucracy” and accelerated reforms gain an anticipatory legitimacy.

Merz opens by exploiting the spatial-symbolic contrast Brende’s introduction has left latent. He names “the calm and peace up here on the magic mountain in Davos” and sets it “at stark contrast” to a world whose “old order” is “unraveling” at “breathtaking pace.” The Davos setting is thus rendered as a phenomenological foil: a place where the appearance of stability becomes a cognitive instrument for perceiving instability elsewhere. This move is not merely atmospheric; it installs the method of the address. Merz will not begin with a single policy item; he begins with a world-description, a claim about the order-structure in which policy becomes meaningful. He then promises a disclosure of standpoint: “Let me share with you how the new German government is looking at these tectonic shifts and how we are addressing them.” The term “tectonic” carries an ontology of change that is at once naturalized and structural: change that is deep, slow in its preparation, sudden in its effects, and resistant to superficial correction. Yet Merz immediately adds a counter-thesis that resists fatalism: “We do have a choice. We can shape the future.” The address thus positions itself inside a tension between structural drift and political agency, with “choice” functioning as the hinge-concept that connects diagnosis to prescription. The internal analytical difficulty is that “choice” here has to do double work: it must be strong enough to ground a call for European action, while remaining compatible with the acknowledgement that the international order’s “very foundations have been shaken.” The speech’s subsequent architecture can be read as an attempt to thicken this hinge so it can bear the weight assigned to it.

Merz’s diagnosis of the “new era” proceeds by selecting three great actors and distributing agency among them in asymmetrical ways. Russia’s war against Ukraine appears as “the most drastic expression so far” of a new era already begun; China’s rise is attributed to “strategic foresight” by which it “worked its way” into the “ranks of the great powers”; the United States’ “global pole position” is “being challenged,” and Washington “reacts by radically reshaping its foreign and security policy.” The grammar matters. Russia expresses the era through violence; China exemplifies it through long-range strategy; the United States responds through radical policy reshaping. Europe, by contrast, is not initially described as an originator of the era; Europe is presented as a subject that must learn to inhabit it. The rhetorical risk is that Europe could appear as merely adaptive. Merz addresses this risk by quickly introducing the language of shaping: Europe has “a choice,” can “shape the future,” must “chart our course.” The speech thus performs a transformation of Europe from an object of great-power dynamics into a candidate for agency within them. The problem is that the speech simultaneously acknowledges that “this new world of great powers is being built on power, on strength, and when it comes to it, on force,” and yet wants to preserve the normative superiority of an order “anchored in international law,” however “imperfect.” The speech therefore must articulate a conception of power compatible with law, and a conception of law that can survive the admission that force returns as a decisive medium.

Merz proposes an explicit schema: European “power” rests on “three pillars”: “our security, our competitiveness, and our unity.” This triad functions as the speech’s architectonic principle, returning repeatedly in later sections in altered forms. It is crucial that the triad is introduced as “European friends,” a vocative that constructs Europe as a community of address within a global forum. Europe is thereby both subject and audience. The pillars are then paired with a performative assurance: “we are doing this.” Each pillar is immediately accompanied by the claim of ongoing action, as if to satisfy the credibility requirements of a business-politics audience. The triad therefore carries both descriptive and strategic messaging: it describes what Europe must have, and it signals that Germany’s government has already begun to operationalize these requirements.

Yet the speech refuses to let this triad settle into complacent managerialism. Merz inserts a moral-historical warning: “A world where only power counts is a dangerous place,” first for small states, then middle powers, then great ones. The argument is an escalation sequence: danger is not localized; it spreads upward. This is an attempt to show that the interest in rules is not a moral luxury of small states, but a structural necessity even for the powerful. Merz then adds a German historical memory as a cautionary exemplum: in the 20th century Germany “went down this road to its bitter end” and pulled the world into a “black abyss.” The function here is twofold. First, it supplies a negative anthropology of power when detached from partnership and trust. Second, it immunizes the speaker against the suspicion that the new emphasis on power entails a relapse into domination: Germany’s historical guilt becomes a warrant for Germany’s insistence on alliances “among equals.” The speech thereby tries to convert a national burden into a universal lesson: the greatest strength is “the ability to build partnerships and alliances among equals based on mutual trust and respect.” This is an attempt to reconcile the earlier pivot toward power with a moral-political conception of equal alliance.

The transatlantic dimension intensifies the speech’s internal problematics, because the United States is presented both as the post-1945 inspirer of alliance logic and as a contemporary actor making “vehement” demands for “greater influence in Greenland.” Merz narrates the Greenland episode with care: Washington argues it is “imperative to counter security threats in the high north.” Merz offers partial validation: Europe “welcome[s]” that the United States takes “the threat posed by Russia in the Arctic seriously.” The rhetoric here is calibrated. Merz acknowledges the security referent, thereby keeping the United States within the frame of shared threat perception, yet he also frames the demand as an “expression of great power rivalry,” aimed at both Europe and the United States. Thus, the Arctic threat is made into a shared object, while the Greenland demand is treated as a symptom of the new era’s rivalry logic. Merz then proceeds to a solidarity pledge: neighbors and partners “including Denmark and the people of Greenland, can count on our solidarity.” He commits Germany to “protect Denmark, Greenland, the North from the threat posed by Russia,” and explicitly names principles: “sovereignty and territorial integrity.” The speech therefore treats the Greenland moment as a test-case for a general thesis: alliance solidarity must be compatible with the refusal of coercion among allies. The sentence “any threat to acquire European territory by force would be unacceptable” is the hinge where the speech brings together deterrence language and legal principle.

A further layer is added when Merz adds trade to the Greenland-security nexus: “new tariffs would also undermine the foundations of transatlantic relations.” This is a characteristic WEF move: security and trade are interlaced, and economic instruments are treated as indicators of alliance trust. Merz proposes Europe’s response would be “united, calm, measured, and firm.” The four adjectives perform a style of sovereignty: firmness without escalation, unity without hysteria, measure without passivity. This style is not merely a preference; it is presented as a rational comportment in an era of harsh winds. The speech thus tries to produce a European ethos: a mode of response that keeps open cooperation while setting limits.

At this point the speech announces a “clear compass” with two directions: Europe must stand together “resolutely and sovereignly,” and “we should not give up on NATO.” The second clause is striking, because it implies the existence of temptations or proposals that would involve abandoning NATO, or at least downgrading it. The speech therefore anticipates internal European debates as much as external threats. Merz references “the historic NATO summit in The Hague last June,” where “material prerequisites” were created: Europe will invest “hundreds of billions of euros” in security. This is described as “a remarkable transatlantic success.” Yet Merz immediately adds that “now we must repair the trust on which the alliance is built.” The event thus dramatizes an alliance that is materially strengthened and affectively strained. The repair of trust becomes the core political-psychological task. Merz offers an unusual claim: Europe’s trust in NATO can be the United States’ “strongest competitive advantage in an age of great powers.” Here “competitive advantage” is imported from economic discourse into alliance politics. The speech thereby attempts to speak to WEF’s business audience by translating geopolitical alignment into a category of advantage that executives recognize. It also reframes alliance as a scarce asset in the global rivalry economy. The speech’s tension is that trust is both instrument and value: it is precious, and it is advantageous. The speech does not resolve the tension; it uses it to make alliance maintenance appear both normatively right and strategically smart.

The line “Democracies do not have subordinates. They have allies, partners and trusted friends” is the speech’s most condensed attempt to articulate the difference between democratic power and authoritarian power. The speech later makes this contrast more colloquial in the translated paraphrase: “dictators might have subordinates,” whereas “we have to be partners and reliable friends.” What is at stake is a theory of political association: democracies are defined as forms of power that require recognition, mutuality, and trust; authoritarianism is defined as power that can be organized through subordination. The speech thereby suggests that democratic power is structurally dependent on legitimacy relations that cannot be replaced by command. Within the event, this distinction functions as a criterion for evaluating alliance behavior. If a democratic ally behaves as if it has subordinates, it damages the democratic form of association and thereby damages its own long-run power. The Greenland and tariff moments are thus folded into a more general thesis about democratic alliance ontology.

From this point, the address shifts toward a more programmatic economic register, offering a pair of “goals” for the government: regaining “economic strength,” and making Europe a “key player again in global politics” economically and “particularly in defense.” Merz insists these goals are “complementary,” “two sides of the same coin.” The coin metaphor is significant because it asserts inseparability: economic competitiveness is not simply a domestic prosperity aim, and defense capability is not simply a security aim; they mutually condition one another. The speech then provides an inferential chain: Germany can “only lead the way” in Europe if economically strong; Europe’s geopolitical influence and defense capability depend on economic momentum. This chain organizes the address’s later reform list. It also reveals the event’s underlying theory of power: power is multi-dimensional, and military capacity without economic vitality becomes fragile. In a WEF context, this is also a rhetorical alignment with the audience’s orientation: economic modernization becomes a geopolitical duty.

Merz then announces the need to be “exceptionally ambitious and courageous” and enumerates four “simultaneous” areas: supporting Ukraine for “just peace,” becoming capable of defense “on our own in Europe,” reducing dependencies that make Europe “vulnerable,” and ensuring the economy’s “full potential for innovation and growth.” The list is framed as interdependent and requires working “together as one European Union.” Germany “pledges” special responsibility. At this juncture, Merz introduces a striking quantitative commitment: increasing Germany’s defense spending “up to 5% of GDP.” Within the video, this is presented as “a huge increase” and is linked to sovereignty, military capabilities, and the reduction of “economic and technological dependencies.” The speech thus integrates defense spending into a broader project of autonomy and resilience. Importantly, Merz denies that this agenda implies “isolationism and protectionism”; instead he speaks of “strategically coordinated ties worldwide.” Europe’s trade ambitions are “crystal clear”: “open markets,” “rules for fair trade,” and “level playing field.” Europe is cast as “the antithesis” to “state-sponsored unfair trade practices,” “raw material protectionism,” “tech prohibition,” and “arbitrary tariffs.” Tariffs are to be “replaced by rules,” and rules must be “respected.” The conceptual structure here is a moralization of rule-governed trade as a civilizational stance in an era of rivalry. Europe becomes the bearer of rules against arbitrariness. Yet the speech also treats trade as a tool of power: rules are not only moral; they are instruments for competitiveness and alliance-building.

The Mercosur episode is introduced as an example of the event’s internal friction between aspiration and institutional constraint. Merz says “Mercosur”, and he “deeply regret[s]” that the European Parliament “put another obstacle” “yesterday.” He then asserts “we will not be stopped,” describes the deal as “fair and balanced,” claims “no alternative” if Europe wants “higher growth,” and anticipates provisional implementation. This is a key moment where the event’s conceptual commitments generate pressure on its categories. Earlier, the speech stresses democracies’ alliance form and the value of trust and respect. Here, Merz speaks in a register of executive determination toward a parliamentary body. He does not deny the Parliament’s legitimacy; yet he frames it as a potential “bottleneck” later in Q&A. The event therefore surfaces a tension within European governance: the need for rapid strategic action under great-power conditions versus the plural procedural structure of EU institutions. The speech does not resolve this tension; it manages it by invoking necessity (“no alternative”) and temporality (“provisionally”). This management is instructive: it shows how emergency-like rhetorics can emerge within procedural polities without formal declaration of emergency, through the repeated invocation of speed, bottlenecks, and urgency.

Merz continues by describing the Commission President’s imminent travel to India to “establish the principles” of a free trade agreement, and he references his own recent visit to India. He then claims the era of great powers presents an “opportunity” for those who “favor regulations above arbitrary rule” and see “greater benefit in free trade than in protectionism and isolationism.” The speech thus constructs a coalition of the regulated: states that prefer rule-based ordering. The phrase “regulations above arbitrary rule” is not merely about economics; it is about political form. Yet in the very next movement, Merz turns inward and criticizes Europe and Germany for “wasted incredible potential for growth” by “dragging feet on reforms” and “unnecessarily and excessively curtailing entrepreneurial freedoms and personal responsibility.” He promises change: “Security and predictability take precedence over excessive regulation and misplaced perfection.” This is a dense sentence because it creates a hierarchy among goods. Regulation is acceptable insofar as it secures predictability; perfectionism becomes “misplaced.” The deeper structure is a revaluation of risk and control: instead of attempting to perfect regulatory schemes, Europe should prioritize stable conditions for action. The speech thus moves toward a classical liberal conception of the conditions of freedom: entrepreneurial freedom and personal responsibility are treated as productive forces whose curtailment diminishes collective strength. Yet this liberalization is framed as necessary for security and competitiveness in great-power conditions, which complicates any simplistic reading of deregulation as purely ideological. The speech tries to place liberal reform inside a defensive realist frame.

Merz’s critique of Europe as “world champion of overregulation” functions as a diagnostic slogan. He narrates the single market’s original purpose: “to form the most competitive economic area in the world.” The diagnosis is that Europe has deviated from telos: the institutional instrument turned into a self-thickening regulatory apparatus. Merz proposes concrete procedural interventions: mobilizing EU leaders for a “special summit” on February 12 to “set the course,” with proposals formulated with Giorgia Meloni, including an “emergency break for bureaucracy,” “discontinuity for legislative work,” and a “modernized EU budget” with competitiveness “center stage,” aiming for a “fast, dynamic Europe” and “service-oriented administration.” The intent is clear: impose temporal brakes and discontinuities on the law-making machine, redirect budget priorities, and recode administration as service. The issue is the conception of law as an activity that can be paused, broken, and reoriented from outside its normal procedural continuity. That conception implies that the legal order is a means rather than an autonomous sphere. Yet earlier, the speech praises an order anchored in international law. The event thus differentiates between law as international constraint on force and law as internal regulatory density. Law is affirmed in one register and problematized in another. The speech’s unity requires this differentiation, yet it also creates an internal question: how does one preserve respect for law while advocating for emergency-like interruptions of legislative work?

Merz then stresses capital markets union and the need for “European champions” to avoid dependence on capital markets “outside Europe.” This is a sovereignty argument in financial terms. It treats financing channels as strategic infrastructure. The speech here aligns with the earlier triad: competitiveness and security are linked through financial autonomy. The repeated “they should be able” cadence—grow in Europe, be financed in Europe, go public in Europe—reads like a normative program that aims to reterritorialize value creation without invoking protectionism. The emphasis is on capacity-building rather than exclusion.

At the national level, Merz emphasizes the Mittelstand (“the so-called middle” in Germany) as a force “to be reckoned with,” and he frames policy as targeted support for innovators, obstacle removal, and improved access to capital markets. He claims energy costs have been reduced and describes an electricity supply focus combining renewables, storage, and “modern gas power plants,” with massive investments in power plants, power lines, and heat supply. He introduces a €500 billion availability for infrastructure modernization, and positions digital transformation as “at the heart” of efforts. Artificial intelligence “requires industrial scale”; Germany has a large pool of industrial data; therefore Germany will invest in “high performance AI gigafactories,” accelerate data centers, and build digital infrastructure for a competitive AI economy. The speech then asserts that research and technology policy is guided by a “new high-tech agenda,” and that Germany is a global leader in cutting-edge research, needing to ensure innovation reaches the market “more consistently,” building “industries of the future.” The address ends this segment with an explicit investor-facing pledge: those who want to invest in the future will find “a very strong partner in Germany.” The event thus makes a direct appeal to the audience’s probable composition—business leaders, investors—while maintaining the political framing of sovereignty and competitiveness.

A feature of this middle segment is its attempt to fuse three kinds of warrant into one narrative: geopolitical realism (great-power era), moral-historical warning (power-only world is dangerous), and technocratic program (AI gigafactories, capital markets union, tax reduction). The unity of the event depends on the claim that these warrants belong together. The speech repeatedly asserts this unity through metaphors (“two sides of the same coin”), through triadic structure (“three pillars”), and through transitions that warn against being distracted by “headlines of the day,” urging attention to the “bigger picture.” This is a self-conscious composition technique: it treats immediate controversies (Greenland, tariffs, parliamentary obstacles) as instances within a more general world-historical shift. Merz thereby attempts to provide a perspective that absorbs the episodic into the structural.

The closing of the prepared address returns to the Enlightenment motif: “Our fate is in our hands. It is in our responsibility and our freedom to shape it.” This returns to the earlier “choice” hinge and tries to stabilize it with a philosophical lineage. The phrase “lesson of enlightenment” is invoked as a general authorization for agency under conditions of uncertainty. The speech ends by naming a “historic task” and Germany’s desire to play a “key role.” The applause cue closes the prepared section, and the event transitions into Q&A, where Brende’s questions re-specify what counts as relevant and what must be defended in more concrete terms.

Brende begins the Q&A by praising Merz for being able to “create some optimism” against a complex geopolitical backdrop, and then he pivots sharply to an economic governance problem: overregulation and the implementation of the Draghi report. The moderator’s move here is disciplining: it requires Merz to translate critique into mechanisms and timeframes. Brende’s question “how are you going to have Europe walk the talk?” positions Merz’s earlier slogans (“world champion of overregulation”) as needing operational detail. He also introduces the Lettera report on internal market completion, and frames an upcoming European Council “offsite” in Belgium on February 12 as the site where these reports will be engaged.

Merz responds by invoking procedural realism: there are “two reports on the table,” and they will be discussed at the February 12 extraordinary meeting; Draghi has visited Berlin; they discussed how to proceed. Merz estimates “only 10%” of proposals have been implemented over 18 months, therefore “we have to do much more.” He welcomes the long debate and frames the meeting as an “offsite” where they will “only talk about competitiveness” and “only talk about how we can reduce red tape.” This answer is significant because it repeats, in Q&A, the speech’s core technique: narrowing attention to a governing problem-space. The exclusivity (“only talk about”) functions as an attempt to produce seriousness through agenda concentration. It also reveals a theory of political action under overload: progress requires temporarily excluding other issues to create decision-capacity.

Merz then introduces an investor sentiment claim: his meetings at Davos make him “extremely optimistic” that many investors and CEOs see Germany as a key place for investments. This is a WEF-compatible appeal: credibility through perceived investor confidence. Yet he couples it with institutional friction: the European Parliament “may not become the bottleneck for all these decisions.” He notes the Commission’s “monopoly for making proposals,” and claims the EU “was never easy,” yet remains “the best answer” for Europe in a changing world. He concludes with a personal affective statement: his optimism is “even bigger” after seeing so many people at Davos. The answer thus performs a balancing act: it acknowledges procedural complexity and institutional constraints, while invoking confidence rooted in elite attention and economic interest.

Brende then presses on growth, citing that the German economy grew after recession at “0.2%” and asks what Merz is doing to see “stronger numbers.” Merz replies that “2% is unsatisfactory” for Germany. He references the IMF improving forecasts for 2026 to 1.1 and 2027 to 1.5, while noting reliance on infrastructure investments financed by additional debt. He distinguishes publicly financed momentum from a durable upswing “constantly looking into the future.” The key concept he then introduces is productivity: “productivity of the German economy is more or less low for a decade now.” This becomes the explanatory pivot. He lists four cost obstacles: energy, bureaucratic burdens, taxes, labor costs. He claims the government is addressing all four, cites tax reductions aiming toward 10% (corporate tax) and about 25% combined in four to five years, notes bureaucratic cost reduction of roughly €3 billion as a “beginning,” and treats labor costs as the “biggest issue,” requiring reform of social security systems, pensions, health, and working time. He compares Germans working “200 hours less” than Swiss workers, implying a need to adjust work-time norms. On energy, he claims reductions of roughly €10 billion for the year, yet insists it is “still not enough,” and acknowledges nuclear power plants have been switched off as a “final decision” that cannot be recalled, requiring new gas plants. This is a dense segment because it shows how Merz performs constraints: he asserts agency (reforms, reductions) while acknowledging fixed decisions (nuclear exit). The event thus demonstrates a practical philosophy of governance: action within inherited commitments, reallocation of effort toward productivity.

The Q&A ends with Brende asking whether European counterparts truly understand the seriousness of implementing Draghi, invoking the Lisbon process and lost competitiveness. Merz replies that colleagues have understood, because the world has “fundamentally changed” over months and years and it is “time to move ahead and to change things.” He then draws on his memory of the early 1990s European Parliament and the implementation of the internal market program culminating January 1, 1993, describing it as a “great momentum” that made Europe strong. He suggests a similar momentum is shared now, recalling 1980s discourse about “sclerosis” of the European Union. He anticipates a European Council meeting “tonight in Brussels” to talk about challenges and expresses hope they can “catch up” and take “strongly needed” decisions. Brende then closes with praise and applause.

If one treats the event as an integrated system, its internal architecture can be described as a sequence of transformations of the same basic problem: Europe’s position in a world newly described as a “time of great power politics.” In the opening diagnosis, the problem is ontological and geopolitical: the foundations of the international order are shaken, force reappears as a decisive medium. The first transformation is normative: Europe must preserve partnership logic and law-based principles, because a power-only world becomes dangerous for all. The second transformation is institutional: NATO is affirmed as indispensable, yet trust must be repaired, and democracies must behave as alliances among equals. The third transformation is economic: competitiveness becomes a condition of geopolitical influence, and overregulation becomes a civilizational risk in rivalry conditions. The fourth transformation is technocratic and financial: capital markets union, AI infrastructure, energy systems, and productivity reforms become the concrete sites where sovereignty is built. Finally, the Q&A transforms the speech’s generalities into procedural and quantitative tasks: implementation rates (“10%”), forecast figures, tax percentages, cost categories, and constraints such as the nuclear exit decision. The event thereby moves from world-description to program, from program to implementation obstacles, and from obstacles to a renewed appeal to momentum and seriousness.

Within this architecture, several conceptual frictions remain productive rather than resolved. The first friction concerns the meaning of “power.” Merz’s speech endorses power as necessary, yet repeatedly qualifies it through alliance, trust, and equality. Power is affirmed as defense capability, economic competitiveness, and unity; it is also warned against as “only power counts.” The event thereby implies a distinction between power as capacity within a rule-governed associative order and power as self-authorizing force. Yet the distinction is never formalized; it is performed through alternating registers: the language of massive defense investment and the language of sovereignty and territorial integrity; the language of competitive advantage and the language of partnerships among equals. This performance is arguably the speech’s core labor: keeping the concept of power from collapsing into domination while still allowing it to bear the weight of deterrence and autonomy.

The second friction concerns law and regulation. International law is affirmed as a foundational anchor whose shaking is lamented. European internal regulation is criticized as excessive and perfectionist, requiring emergency brakes and discontinuity. The event thus contains a dual valuation: law as protection against force, and regulation as potential obstacle to competitiveness. The unity requires a principled distinction between law that secures the conditions of peaceful coexistence and regulation that impedes innovation and growth. The speech gestures toward such a distinction by privileging “security and predictability” over “misplaced perfection,” implying that regulation is justified when it stabilizes expectations and reduces arbitrary risk. Yet the event leaves open how to adjudicate borderline cases, and it leaves open how to prevent the drive for competitiveness from eroding the procedural legitimacy that democracies require.

The third friction concerns European democracy and executive urgency. Merz frames the European Parliament as a potential bottleneck and regrets its obstacle to Mercosur, while praising Europe as a democracy-based alliance form where subordination has no place. The tension is structural: democratic pluralism slows decisions; great-power rivalry punishes slowness. The event tries to manage this through the rhetoric of momentum, offsites, special summits, agenda concentration, and provisional application of agreements. What emerges is a conception of governance under pressure that values procedural legitimacy while seeking methods of acceleration that remain inside the institutional frame. The success of this conception depends on the audience’s tolerance for strategic ambiguity: the event does not offer a detailed constitutional theory of how to reconcile speed and plural procedure; it offers a political intention and a set of tactical devices.

The fourth friction concerns transatlantic alliance under strain. Merz invokes the United States as inspirer of post-1945 alliance logic and as contemporary actor making vehement demands over Greenland and potentially tariffs. The event treats these strains as repairable through talks based on sovereignty and territorial integrity, and through recognition that NATO trust is a competitive advantage for the United States. The wager is that alliance is self-interest properly understood: an interest that includes restraint and recognition. The Greenland episode functions as a test of whether that wager can survive great-power temptation even inside democratic polities. The event does not claim certainty; it claims a direction and welcomes “steps” and “remarks” as signs of movement.

Finally, there is a methodological tension between realism and hope. Merz insists on harsh realities and cleareyed realism, yet speaks of shaping the future, invokes Enlightenment responsibility, and introduces a “principle of hope” in the paraphrase segment. Hope here is neither sentimentality nor prediction; it functions as a normative orientation that authorizes continued work on alliances and reforms despite frustration.

The event’s most persistent device for generating unity is its handling of temporality, which appears in several distinct but mutually reinforcing forms: the “new era” already begun; the “breathtaking pace” of an unraveling order; the retrospective invocation of 1945 as an alliance-founding hinge; the forward-oriented claim that “our fate is in our hands”; and the procedural calendar of European councils, offsites, and special summits. If one treats these temporal markers as more than incidental, they disclose the event’s underlying theory of political rationality. Merz is not simply describing a sequence of happenings; he is staging an epistemic discipline under conditions in which time itself becomes a scarce political resource. The speech’s insistence that “we are doing this” at each pillar, and the moderator’s repeated demand for “implementation,” suggests that the event is governed by an anxiety about lag: the fear that Europe will grasp the correct diagnosis only after the decisive window for action has closed. This helps explain why “competitiveness,” “security,” and “unity” are cast as pillars rather than as separate policy sectors. A pillar is not chosen; it is presupposed as load-bearing. The triad therefore works as a temporal compression technique: it allows a broad set of reforms and commitments to be represented as a single structure that can be built quickly because its basic categories are already set.

The opening contrast between Davos’s calm and the world’s unraveling pace performs a second function beyond atmosphere. It licenses a particular kind of abstraction. The calm “up here” becomes a vantage that authorizes large-scale claims about “tectonic shifts.” That abstraction is then immediately translated into concrete referents—Russia, China, the United States, Greenland, tariffs—so the event oscillates between two registers: a structural world-picture and a case-based enumeration. This oscillation is not accidental; it is how the address maintains its epistemic authority. If it stayed structural, it would risk sounding like a general lecture detached from governable reality. If it stayed episodic, it would risk sounding like reactive commentary. The event therefore continuously converts one register into the other. Greenland becomes a local instantiation of a general great-power logic; the principle of territorial integrity becomes a general rule illustrated by a specific controversy; “overregulation” becomes a structural diagnosis anchored by an institutional episode (“another obstacle” in Parliament “yesterday”); productivity becomes a structural economic issue made tangible by lists of cost categories and by tax percentages. Each conversion is a methodological move that supports the claim that the speaker sees both the “bigger picture” and its operational levers.

A key point of interpretive pressure lies in the speech’s internal concept of Europe, because “Europe” appears in multiple capacities: Europe as an actor in great-power politics; Europe as an institutional configuration (EU and NATO); Europe as a moral-political form (democracies and allies); and Europe as an economic space (single market, competitiveness, capital markets). The event treats these capacities as mutually reinforcing, yet their logics differ. In the great-power register, Europe risks becoming an object unless it acquires capabilities. In the institutional register, Europe’s agency is mediated through procedural bodies, whose frictions become obstacles. In the moral form register, Europe is defined by alliance among equals and by a refusal of subordination. In the economic space register, Europe is defined by integration and rules that enable markets. The event’s difficulty is that each of these “Europes” can conflict with the others. Procedural Europe can slow capability-building Europe; moral-form Europe can constrain the kinds of leverage capability-building Europe might want; market Europe can demand openness while security Europe demands reduced dependency. The speech’s unity depends on treating these conflicts as resolvable through the triad of security, competitiveness, unity. The triad is thus not merely a list; it functions as a conceptual mediator that promises commensurability among different “Europes.”

One can see this mediating function in how “sovereignty” is deployed. Merz uses sovereignty in a manner that carries a distinctly relational accent. Sovereignty is not merely self-enclosure; it is the principle that protects territorial integrity and thereby defines the limits of legitimate influence, even among allies. In the Greenland segment, sovereignty appears as the normative boundary that makes talks possible: talks are supported “on the basis of these principles.” The speech therefore presents sovereignty as a condition of cooperation rather than as a refusal of it. Yet sovereignty also appears as capacity: boosting military capabilities “means to assert our sovereignty,” and strengthening defense reduces economic and technological dependencies. Here sovereignty is tied to material capability and resilience. The event’s move is to unify these dimensions: sovereignty as principle and sovereignty as capacity. This unification is crucial, because it allows defense spending to be framed as a reinforcement of lawful order rather than as a drift toward unilateralism. It also allows economic reforms to be framed as strategic autonomy rather than as mere pro-market agenda. The speech’s strategic success depends on this synthesis holding in the audience’s interpretation.

The rhetorical mechanism that keeps the conceptual space from collapsing is Merz’s repeated appeal to “trust.” Trust appears as the substance of partnerships “among equals,” as the property on which NATO is “built,” and as a thing that must be “repaired.” Trust is treated as both vulnerable and valuable, a scarce political capital that can be undermined by threats of force or by tariffs. The novelty in the event lies in the way trust is made to do economic work: trust is a “competitive advantage.” This phrase re-codes a relational moral category into an instrument within global rivalry. In the event’s economy of justification, this recoding is meant to persuade two audiences simultaneously: political actors who recognize alliance as a normative commitment, and economic actors who recognize advantage as an operational category. Trust thereby becomes a bridge-concept. Yet it also creates the event’s most delicate tension, because if trust is framed too strongly as an instrument, it risks losing its binding force as a commitment. The speech navigates this by alternating tones: trust is “precious,” and trust is advantageous. The event demands from its reader a sensitivity to this alternation, because the meaning shifts depending on which tone dominates a given segment.

Merz’s answers reveal an implicit theory of European governance that can be reconstructed from the event’s internal cues. First, Merz treats agenda design as decisive. The “offsite” that will “only talk about competitiveness” is presented as a necessary condition for progress. This implies a diagnosis that Europe’s procedural bodies suffer from agenda overload and diffusion. Concentration is therefore a political technology. Second, Merz treats leadership as coalition formation among executives. He speaks of mobilizing EU leaders, convening a special summit, formulating proposals with another leader. This implies that Europe’s capacity to act depends on the ability of key leaders to create a critical mass that can steer institutional machinery. Third, Merz treats the European Parliament as a potential bottleneck. This is not framed as illegitimate; it is framed as a risk to speed. The event therefore implies a structural tension between representative pluralism and executive urgency. Fourth, Merz emphasizes the Commission’s proposal monopoly. This suggests a focus on institutional levers: who can initiate legislative pathways matters as much as who can block them. The event thus frames European governance as a system of constrained agency, where action requires navigating specific chokepoints.

The Mercosur moment is the most revealing site for this governance theory because it displays how Merz speaks about obstacles and necessity. The deal is “fair and balanced,” there is “no alternative” if Europe wants higher growth, and provisional implementation is anticipated. Each of these assertions plays a role in shaping legitimacy. “Fair and balanced” attempts to settle normative contestation. “No alternative” attempts to settle strategic contestation. “Provisional” attempts to settle procedural contestation by allowing movement before full ratification. The trio forms a compact justification structure: normative acceptability, strategic necessity, procedural workaround. That structure is a classic pattern of political reasoning under pressure, and the event offers it as a template for how Europe must act in a great-power era.

Yet the event simultaneously includes a moral warning about a world where “only power counts.” This moral warning, reinforced by the German historical memory of catastrophe, could be read as a caution against “no alternative” rhetoric, because “no alternative” tends to disable deliberation and thereby threatens democratic legitimacy. The event’s own commitments therefore generate pressure on its justificatory forms. Merz does not explicitly address this meta-level tension; he manages it by embedding urgency inside a broader affirmation of democratic alliance form. The line “Democracies do not have subordinates” becomes a kind of ethical boundary-marker intended to prevent the discourse of necessity from sliding into authoritarian decisiveness. The success of this boundary-marker is not guaranteed by the speech; it is an interpretive responsibility placed on the audience’s competence.

The event’s handling of “dependencies” is another place where its internal architecture produces both unity and tension. Merz lists dependency reduction as a core area of progress, linking it to vulnerability. He later links defense strengthening to reduced economic and technological dependencies. He then insists there is “no room for isolationism and protectionism,” speaking instead of “strategically coordinated ties worldwide” and open markets. This produces a conceptual puzzle: reducing dependencies can mean decoupling, while open markets can mean deeper interdependence. The event resolves this implicitly by distinguishing between vulnerable dependencies and strategically coordinated ties. That distinction is never formalized, yet it is operationalized in the speech through the language of rules, fair trade, and level playing field. The implied criterion is that interdependence becomes legitimate and desirable when governed by rules that reduce arbitrariness and coercion. Dependencies become vulnerabilities when they are governed by unilateral leverage, state-sponsored distortions, or strategic chokeholds in raw materials and technology. Europe’s role becomes to create a regime of interdependence that is rule-bounded and diversified, and to build internal capacities (capital markets, energy systems, defense) that reduce exposure to coercive leverage. This is a sophisticated synthesis, but it remains implied rather than explicit, which again places interpretive demands on the reader.

The speech’s economic reform content gains analytical depth when one treats “productivity” as more than an economic indicator. Merz’s claim that productivity has been low for a decade functions as an existential diagnosis of capacity. In the event’s internal logic, productivity is what connects the moral aspiration to shape fate with the material ability to do so. If productivity stagnates, then defense investment becomes fiscally burdensome, social systems become harder to sustain, innovation becomes slower, and Europe’s geopolitical influence weakens. Productivity thus becomes a silent ground of sovereignty. This is why Merz’s list of obstacles—energy, bureaucracy, taxes, labor costs—matters as a conceptual set rather than as a policy list. Each obstacle is a different modality of constraint on productive capacity: energy as input cost and infrastructural constraint; bureaucracy as friction and time-loss; taxes as incentive and capital allocation structure; labor costs and working time as the socially organized form of effort. Merz’s answer implies that productivity is not a natural fact but a socially mediated outcome shaped by institutions and norms. His comparison with Swiss working hours introduces a culturally charged element: work-time habits are treated as reformable. This is a risky claim politically, yet within the event it serves to demonstrate seriousness: competitiveness will not be regained by rhetoric alone; it requires touching sensitive social arrangements.

The nuclear power remark is similarly revealing. Merz says the switch-off is a “final decision” that cannot be recalled. This is a rare moment in the event where a limit is explicitly acknowledged. The event’s general tone is one of agency and shaping. Here, shaping must operate within irreversible prior choices. The speaker responds by proposing new gas power plants and broader energy system reform. The point is that political agency is presented as recomposition rather than reset. The event thereby offers a model of responsibility: accept certain path dependencies, then rebuild the system’s other components so the overall structure remains viable. This model is compatible with Merz’s earlier triadic architecture, where pillars can be strengthened even if some materials are inherited.

The digital transformation and AI segment extends this model into the technological domain. Merz states that AI requires “industrial scale,” and Germany has a large pool of industrial data, therefore Germany will invest in “AI gigafactories” and data centers and build digital infrastructure. The rhetoric here is intentionally infrastructural. AI is not presented as a fashionable tool; it is presented as a scale-dependent industrial capacity. This framing is congruent with the earlier emphasis on sovereignty and competitiveness. It also integrates the WEF setting, where technological transformation is a key theme, into the speech’s broader narrative. The term “gigafactories” carries connotations of massive capital deployment and industrial strategy. The event thus positions Germany as a site where global capital can find “long-term reliability” through “clear rules” and “strong institutions.” Here again the speech performs the synthesis of liberal and strategic registers: attract private investment while asserting a national agenda of transformation.

If one examines the speech’s rhetorical form more closely, one sees repeated cycles of assertion, qualification, and reassertion. Merz asserts the new era, qualifies it by denying fatalism, reasserts agency through choice and shaping. He asserts the need for power, qualifies it by warning against a power-only world and invoking historical catastrophe, reasserts power in the form of partnerships and alliances among equals. He asserts solidarity with Denmark and Greenland, qualifies it by supporting talks and welcoming U.S. seriousness about Arctic threats, reasserts a boundary against force and tariffs. He asserts Europe’s need for competitiveness, qualifies it by acknowledging institutional bottlenecks and slow implementation, reasserts momentum through special summits and concentrated agenda. This cycling is how the event maintains a neutral, “realist” posture while still moving toward prescriptions. The repeated qualifications are not mere hedges; they are structural devices that prevent the address from appearing as either naïve idealism or crude power politics.

The most conceptually charged segment remains the speech’s attempt to connect Enlightenment language with a great-power diagnosis. The phrase “fate is in our hands” functions as a bridge between moral autonomy and geopolitical realism. It implies that even in a world built on power and force, there remains a domain of responsibility where Europe can shape outcomes. This is an attempt to avoid the despairing conclusion that great-power rivalry eliminates freedom. Yet the event also demands “cleareyed realism,” which implies that Enlightenment autonomy must be disciplined by a recognition of force. The speech thus approximates a conception of freedom that is compatible with constraint: freedom as the capacity to choose and act under conditions not of one’s own making. The event’s invocation of Enlightenment does not serve as ornament; it serves to stabilize the legitimacy of demanding reforms and burdens, including defense spending, working time changes, and deregulation, by placing them inside a moral narrative of responsibility.

The conclusion of the Q&A returns to “momentum,” and this is where the event tries to stabilize its tensions. Merz’s recollection of implementing the internal market program in the early 1990s serves as a model of successful European action. It is not simply nostalgia; it is a claim that Europe has previously demonstrated the capacity to act decisively through institutional processes. The reference to “sclerosis” in the 1980s and renewed momentum now suggests a cyclical model: periods of stagnation followed by bursts of reform triggered by external pressure. The event implies that great-power rivalry is the new external pressure generating a reform burst. This cyclical model serves to justify optimism without denying difficulty. It also implicitly addresses Brende’s Lisbon process worry: Europe has failed before, yet Europe has also succeeded, and Merz claims the present resembles a success phase more than a failure phase.

One can track definitional drift in the event’s key terms. “Competitiveness,” for example, begins as a pillar, then becomes a justification for deregulation, then becomes a target of reports (Draghi, Lettera), then becomes a matter of implementation percentages, then becomes a function of productivity and cost structure. Each step thickens the term. By the end, competitiveness no longer means simply “being strong in markets.” It means an entire configuration of energy systems, bureaucracy reduction, tax structure, labor norms, capital markets union, and technological infrastructure. Similarly, “security” begins as defense capability, then includes Arctic security and hybrid attacks in the Baltic Sea, then includes alliance trust, then includes reducing dependencies, then includes the capacity to withstand economic coercion. “Unity” begins as standing closer together among Europeans and like-minded partners, then becomes a requirement for measured tariff responses, then becomes an institutional challenge involving the Parliament, Commission, and Council, then becomes a historical memory of internal market implementation. The event thus constructs its own conceptual universe gradually, with each recurrence of a term carrying new determinations.

A particularly subtle drift occurs around the term “sovereignly.” In the speech, Europe must stand together “resolutely and sovereignly.” The adverb suggests a mode of action rather than a status. Sovereign action is action that sets its own priorities, defends its principles, and does not yield to coercion. Yet the event also insists on NATO and on alliances. Sovereign action here therefore cannot mean unilateral action; it means action within alliances that preserves equality and principles. This concept of sovereignty is relational sovereignty: sovereignty exercised through cooperation under shared rules rather than through isolation. The Greenland segment becomes a paradigmatic case: solidarity with Denmark and Greenland is an expression of Europe’s sovereignty, and talks with the United States are supported on sovereignty’s basis. This relational sovereignty is central to the event’s structure, because it aims to reconcile autonomy with interdependence, and strength with rule-boundedness.

The audience invoked by the speech is also internally complex. Merz addresses “European friends,” “ladies and gentlemen,” and implicitly the WEF constituency of CEOs and investors, while also speaking as a national leader accountable to domestic politics and as a European leader within EU and NATO frameworks. This multiplicity shapes the speech’s argumentation. When Merz says “whoever wants to invest in the future … you will find a very strong partner in Germany,” he speaks in a business register directed at capital. When he invokes Germany’s 20th-century catastrophe, he speaks in a moral-historical register directed at political legitimacy and international trust. When he speaks of defense spending up to 5% of GDP, he speaks in a strategic register directed at deterrence credibility and alliance burden-sharing. When he speaks of overregulation and emergency brakes for bureaucracy, he speaks in a governance register directed at EU institutional reform. The event’s unity depends on the claim that these audiences can be addressed simultaneously because their interests converge under great-power conditions. That convergence is itself a thesis of the event: security, competitiveness, unity serve as a common ground where political legitimacy and market confidence can align.

This brings one to the event’s implicit model of legitimacy. Legitimacy appears in at least three forms: procedural legitimacy (EU institutions, Commission proposal monopoly, parliamentary decisions), normative legitimacy (sovereignty and territorial integrity, alliances among equals), and performance legitimacy (competitiveness, growth, investor optimism). The speech attempts to balance these forms by presenting reforms and investments as necessary for performance, while insisting on normative boundaries and partnership principles, and navigating procedural constraints through special summits and concentrated agendas. The internal tension is that performance legitimacy often demands speed, while procedural legitimacy often generates delay, and normative legitimacy often requires restraint. The event’s central achievement, as a piece of public reasoning, lies in how it keeps these three forms in play without allowing any single one to dominate entirely. It does not fully reconcile them; it constructs a workable equilibrium by repeatedly shifting emphasis: speed is demanded, then restrained by principle; principle is asserted, then operationalized through investments and reforms; procedure is acknowledged, then managed through agenda design.

The event’s internal logic of “great power politics” as a concept that is at once descriptive and performative. Descriptively, it refers to a world built on power, strength, and force, where international law’s foundations are shaken. Performatively, it functions as a justification for policy shifts that would otherwise face greater contestation: massive defense spending, deregulation, capital markets union acceleration, strategic trade agreement pursuit, and explicit solidarity positions in Arctic-related disputes. “Great power politics” thus operates as an explanatory category and as a legitimating frame. The event treats it as unavoidable reality, yet also insists it is not fate because Europe can shape the future. This is a tight conceptual knot: if the era is defined by power and force, shaping it requires acquiring power; yet acquiring power risks reproducing the era’s dangerous logic. The event’s resolution attempt is the concept of power anchored in alliances among equals and in rule-based order. The effectiveness of that attempt depends on whether one accepts that alliances and rules can be sources of power rather than constraints upon it. Merz repeatedly asserts they are, with NATO as the exemplary case. The speech therefore implies a theory of power-as-coordination: power emerges from the capacity to coordinate among equals under shared rules, producing strength that is greater than unilateral force.