As Barack Obama meets Angela Merkel for the last time in his presidency, he may be tempted to think back to one of their first encounters, when the German chancellor gave a historic speech in front the US Congress in November 2009. Unusually for a politician whose standard rhetoric is characterised by wilful unwieldiness, Merkel’s speech flowed freely, reaching for personal anecdotes and hyperbole.

America, Merkel confided back then, had been the country of her dreams before the fall of the wall and the destination of her first trip abroad shortly after, and she would never forget her first glimpse of the Pacific Ocean. “I was passionate about the vast American landscape, which seemed to breathe the very spirit of freedom and independence,” she said. It was one of the rare occasions when the German Christian Democrat sounded like a US president.

Seven years later, Merkel finds herself in the uncomfortable position of being under pressure to teach the values she once admired in America back to the United States. In the wake of Donald Trump’s election victory, the Obama visit has been declared a symbolic passing of the baton.

Such colossal expectations are not entirely without foundation. In the aftermath of the US result, Merkel acknowledged Trump’s triumph with the conditionality usually applied to diplomacy with Russia or China. She offered cooperation on the basis of values such as “democracy, freedom, respect for the rule of law and the dignity of humankind – independent of origin, skin colour, religion, gender, sexual orientation or political views.”

In a joint op-ed published in Wirtschaftswoche on the eve of the visit, Obama and Merkel vowed: “There won’t be a return to a world before globalisation. Germans and Americans have to seize the opportunity to shape globalisation according to their values and ideas. We owe it to our businesses and our citizens – the whole global community, even – to broaden and deepen our cooperation.”

During Europe’s refugee crisis, Merkel has pursued a course emphasising universal values rather than pure national interests. And while the policy decisions required by that course have come at the cost of the resurgence of a new rightwing populist movement – manifested by painful defeats in a string of state elections – Germany’s political landscape remains more stable than that in Britain or France.

A CNN interview in which Norbert Röttgen, chairman of the Bundestag’s committee on foreign affairs, confidently asserted that Merkel would run for reelection in 2017 was widely mocked on German media on Wednesday, but only because, until Merkel says otherwise, her standing for a fourth term is now widely seen as a foregone conclusion.

Given how little she has done to pave the way for a successor from her own party, anything but another candidacy would amount to a “flight from responsibility”, said Werner Patzelt, a political scientist at Dresden’s Technical University.

A sign at a demo organised by Alternative für Deutschland in Erfurt in February. Photograph: Jens Meyer/AP

Alternative für Deutschland has been regularly polling at 10-15% and is all but certain to enter parliament after next year’s general election, but it would take a political earthquake even more momentous than those in Britain or the US to catapult the anti-refugee party into government. Coalitions with the rightwing newcomers remain taboo, and majority governments are mathematically next to impossible in Germany’s crowded multi-party system.

A lack of electoral alternatives is likely to provide further fuel to populist anger against the status quo, but the latest polls point towards a continuation of the current coalition between centre-right CDU and centre-left SPD.

“Unless the Social Democrats, Left party and Greens confidently campaign for a leftwing coalition government, another grand coalition looks highly likely – as disastrous as that may be for the country’s political climate,” said Patzelt.

Yet even with Merkel likely to remain in the chancellory for another four years, there are fears in Berlin that Germany may struggle to assume America’s status as the torchbearer for liberal democracy.

“Even during the biggest setbacks to US-German relations – from McCarthy to Guantánamo – there was always still a joint belief in a liberal pluralistic society. That belief has never been questioned as seriously, and yet in as frivolous a manner, as now,” said Sylke Tempel, a historian and editor-in-chief of the foreign policy journal Internationale Politik.

At the start of the year, Germany’s defence minister, Ursula von der Leyen, vowed to reverse years of declining military spending, and observers believe the country is now seriously committed to meeting the target of 2% of GDP spending recommended for Nato members. Germany has trained Kurdish peshmerga fighters in the fight against Isis, assisted France’s anti-terror efforts in Mali, and sent soldiers to Lithuania and fighter planes to Estonia.



But the German public’s appetite for military intervention remains low, as Obama discovered when it held back Nato and EU ambitions in Libya in 2011, and after the Ghouta chemical attack in 2013, when Merkel said her country would not get involved in a military campaign in Syria.

Even if Germany was to increase its defence spending overnight, Nato would still be disproportionately reliant on America’s contribution, which is 3.8% of its GDP and covers 75% of Nato’s defence expenditure.

“The expectations of Germany are astronomical, but we don’t have the instruments to live up to them,” said Niels Annen, a foreign policy spokesperson for Merkel’s coalition partners, the Social Democratic party. “Germany will work hard to hold Europe together, but our strength lies in mediation, not in military might.”

German soldiers on patrol in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan, in 2009. Photograph: Michael Kappeler/AFP/Getty Images

Further European cooperation on defence is a tall order in the current political climate. “After six years of being pulled apart by the eurozone crisis, how can the EU suddenly be expected to pull together under German leadership?” said Hans Kundnani, a fellow with the German Marshall Fund.

Even if Trump were not to act on his election campaign scepticism of America’s Nato commitments, Kundnani argued, his victory had already done lasting damage to geopolitical power relations.

“EU integration has always taken place within the context of America’s nuclear umbrella – some may say only because of it,” he said. “US power sucked centuries of balance-of-power conflicts out of the European continent. Now that old certainties are no more, those tensions could return.”

Britain and France, the only two European states with nuclear arsenals, may feel more emboldened to use security as leverage in future negotiations, he suggested. Even if Merkel’s Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats manage to shore up power domestically, the new dynamics of power on the continent are likely to test what the foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, has called Germany’s “reflective power”.

The most realistic hope one could have for leadership on Merkel’s behalf is that she is an intellectual role model, argued Ulrich Speck, a senior fellow with Spain’s Elcano Royal Institute and an expert in US-German relations.

“The best people can hope for is Merkel could become a torchbearer for anti-populism, the belief that politics is not just about national interests but also about values. But her room for doing so, and America’s willingness to listen, will be limited.”