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At E.U. Meeting, a Hobbled Merkel and a Stalled Agenda

When Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany arrived at the European Union summit meeting in Brussels on Thursday, her normal aura was missing.Credit...Phil Noble/Reuters

BRUSSELS — For the past decade or more, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, has commanded the stage at European Union summit meetings. But as she strode through the red carpeted entrance at the start of this week’s meeting, her usual aura was missing.

Everyone understands that her era is ending. Even so, it was telling that as leaders arrived on Thursday for this meeting, France’s energetic young president, Emmanuel Macron, was already there, responding to reporters. Smiling indulgently, Ms. Merkel went over to his side and said, “Oh, he’s answering all the questions.”

Germany, long Europe’s steadying force, has been without a government since an inconclusive election in September, and there is anxiety in Berlin that the country will be seen as unstable. The problem of Germany is, however, paralysis. While Germany argues about a new government, Europe waits.

At this last summit meeting of the year, the issue of Britain’s exit from the bloc was less pressing, since governments all agreed on Friday that negotiations can move on to the next phase. But Europe has a host of other problems, and for everything else, Germany remains central.

The paralysis in Berlin, however, with a new government not expected until March and Ms. Merkel weakened, has delayed what was meant to be the central task of the bloc — figuring out how to reform itself institutionally to ensure that the euro is weatherproof and sustainable, to avoid new shocks from member states like Greece, Spain and Italy.

Mr. Macron has laid out an ambitious set of reforms for the eurozone and the bloc itself, pushing for more centralization, more “Europe” and more solidarity, both in economics and defense. The European Commission, the bloc’s bureaucracy, has proposed a similarly centralizing set of changes.

This was the summit meeting where European leaders were supposed to grapple with Mr. Macron’s sweeping proposals for institutional change. But Ms. Merkel cannot move without a mandate. And while she participated in a relatively acrimonious dinner discussion Thursday night over migration, defending past policy about the need for bloc solidarity in distributing refugees, she has been noticeably media-averse, canceling her normal after-dinner news briefing.

“There is a strong sense in Europe that something has to change and Germany will have to be at the center of that,” said Jan Techau, a German political analyst. “But whether the issue is the economy or defense, I’m not sure Germans feel that they can get it done, given Merkel’s declining political capital. The problems are huge, but Germans are not sure we’re up to it.”

Even more, Mr. Techau said, “German and French ideas on European governance are very far from each other.”

With Germany’s caretaker government unable to make new policy, Mr. Macron and the commission cannot get a considered response, blocking progress. So the summit meeting discussed migration, with no decisions expected before June at the earliest, and nascent moves toward more cooperation and efficiency on European defense and procurement.

In a symbolic gesture, Ms. Merkel and Mr. Macron gave a joint news conference at the conclusion of the meeting. She thanked him for his “close relations with us,’’ and said that French-German agreement was important for European solutions.

But Mr. Macron noted, a touch wistfully, that “Germany, which has constraints that go with its political system, just had its elections and is in the process of forming a government.” He added, “We need a strong and stable German government to move forward.”

He added that Ms. Merkel was busy building a coalition, “but we can still talk to one another, and we have the aim of converging in March” their positions on eurozone reforms, so that the bloc could agree on a “road map” in June.

On real substance, though, Europe waits for the Germans. The Social Democrats, who had originally refused to form a government with Ms. Merkel’s conservatives, are beginning to negotiate just such a return. To enhance their profile, Social Democratic leaders have been pressing for a bigger role for Europe to stabilize the eurozone and carve out a clearer global role in the era of President Trump, when Washington has retreated from its traditional leadership of multilateral alliances, institutions and global trading systems.

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President Emmanuel Macron of France has ambitious plans for Europe, but he cannot move forward because of Germany’s political paralysis.Credit...Stephanie Lecocq/European Pressphoto Agency

Germany’s acting foreign minister, Sigmar Gabriel, argued last week that America’s leadership was now unreliable and called for a sharper definition of European interests, with a major effort to support Mr. Macron. The leader of the Social Democrats, Martin Schulz, even called for the European Union to become a “United States of Europe,” with countries that do not like the idea to be expelled.

Both trial balloons, which were perceived as slightly desperate, were quickly shot down, and for good reason.

The lesson of recent European elections — in Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria and Central Europe — is one of increased nationalism, populism and skepticism about “more Europe.” Mr. Macron’s election, which depended on the collapse of the two main parties from infighting and scandal, seems more like an outlier than the herald of a new European commitment.

With impending European parliamentary elections and a change in European leadership in Brussels in 2019, the window for pushing through any serious change in European structures is very tight and closing — essentially the same window for getting an agreement on Britain’s withdrawal from the bloc in March 2019.

Simon Fraser, a former senior British diplomat with long experience in Brussels, sees positive energy in Mr. Macron’s proposals and in his commitment to reform France’s labor market.

“Macron wants to re-energize the E.U.,” Mr. Fraser said. “But he’s being left a bit high and dry by the Germans, and what Macron proposes won’t get a lot of traction with Berlin. His big risk, with only about six months left to this European Commission, is to push too hard. He has a lot of cards, but he needs to play them very carefully.”

Given the obstacles, the summit meeting concentrated instead on blessing a modest advance toward European defense, called “Permanent Structured Cooperation,” or Pesco. Twenty-five of the bloc’s 28 countries have signed up for it, with the idea being to promote national projects that enhance interoperability, efficiency in procurement and better military research and development. National commitments will be binding, there will be European Union money to foster research and cooperation, and there will be regular, coordinated national reviews of progress.

To show that this time, NATO is on board with this new European initiative, NATO’s secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, made a rare appearance on Thursday at the meeting of European leaders.

Elmar Brok, a conservative German member of the European Parliament, saw great progress now that British anxiety about European defense harming NATO has evaporated.

“We’ve advanced in 12 months more in defense than in the last 12 years, because the British no longer stopped us,” he said. “This is the answer to spending more and more efficiently on defense.”

While many in Europe and in the United States want Germany to take a more ambitious leadership role consonant with its size and thriving economy, Germans themselves are much more reluctant, according to a Kӧrber Foundation opinion poll released last week. Only 40 percent of Germans say they should take more responsibility for international affairs, the poll showed, and nearly 60 percent say the European Union is “not on the right track.”

While the German elite talks of embracing Mr. Macron’s ideas, only 12 percent of Germans regard the French-German partnership as crucial to the European Union, and 54 percent oppose Mr. Macron’s proposal for a eurozone finance minister.

German mistrust of Mr. Trump is high, with 88 percent believing Germany’s security is best protected in the context of Europe, but only 32 percent want to spend any more money on defense. And three times as many Germans see refugees, and not Russia, as their biggest security concern. (The telephone poll of 1,005 people has a margin of error of 5 percentage points.)

There was a lot of public optimism that 2017 would be the year “of dodging bullets and getting Europe back on track,” said Robin Niblett, director of Chatham House, an international affairs think tank based in London. “But the last couple of months have shown that Europe may be better grounded economically, but not politically.”

“In Germany there is a fin de siècle quality around Merkel,” he said, “but without an obvious successor, and there is none of the usual sense of power moving smoothly from one party to another. There’s deep skepticism about political parties and what they have been delivering; populism survives and the uncertainties are stretching into 2018 — with new ones, like migration and worries over Italy.”

And then there’s Brexit, Phase 2.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: Germany’s Political Inertia Stalls E.U.’s Progress. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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