Merz Pursues Baku Gas Target

Friedrich Merz, Germany's chancellor, received Azerbaijan's president Ilham Aliyev in Berlin this week for talks on energy and trade (Euronews). The polite choreography hid the harder issue: Europe's plan to move away from Russian gas is leaning more heavily on a supplier whose politics sit awkwardly with Berlin's language on democracy and rights.

A Pledge, Not a Contract

Germany is not opening a new route from scratch. It is joining a gas corridor that Italy, Greece and Bulgaria have already used for years. The political base is the July 2022 EU-Azerbaijan memorandum, in which the European Commission, the EU's executive arm, said it would support raising Azerbaijani gas deliveries to at least 20 billion cubic metres a year by 2027 (European Commission). That memorandum is a signal, not EU law and not a purchase order. The binding obligations are in separate commercial contracts between companies.

The infrastructure exists. Azerbaijani gas moves through three connected pipelines across the Caucasus and Turkey, then enters the EU through the Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP), which crosses Greece and Albania before landing in southern Italy (TAP, IEA). In 2025, Azerbaijan supplied around 12.5 bcm to EU countries, about 8.1% of EU pipeline-gas imports (kmetro0.eu, Balcani Caucaso). That is real supply, but nowhere near a replacement for Russia.

Getting to 20 bcm would mean new investment in Azerbaijani gas fields, expanding TAP beyond its current 10 bcm design capacity, and finding buyers ready to sign the long-term contracts Baku wants before it spends the money (Serbia Energy). For Malta, which does not sit on this pipeline map but buys energy in the same European market, the issue is not only where the gas lands. It is whether the EU is lowering price risk or simply moving political risk from one supplier to another.

Germany's Way In — and the Missing Northward Route

Germany's entry point is a concrete deal. State-backed trader SEFE signed a ten-year contract with Azerbaijan's state oil company SOCAR for 1.5 bcm a year from 2025 (Azernews). That gives Berlin a commercial stake in a route that until now mainly served south-eastern Europe.

The problem is geography. To get southern gas to Germany, Europe needs the so-called Vertical Corridor: a chain of pipeline links connecting national gas grids through Greece, Bulgaria and Romania, so gas can move north. Bulgarian upgrades are planned for late 2026, but the route still depends on governments and companies agreeing who pays, who reserves pipeline capacity, and what happens when demand rises at the same time in several countries. Those questions remain open.

Hungary shows how easily diversification can become a slogan before it becomes a shift in supply. Budapest signed for 800 million cubic metres over two years, about 3% of Hungary's annual imports (Makronom). The government presents this as sovereign energy policy. Yet in the first five months of 2026, Hungary spent more on Russian pipeline gas than any other EU member state (Telex). A small Azerbaijani contract can give a government a diversification story without changing the dependency underneath.

No Rights Clause, No Transparency

The EU's gas memorandum with Baku contains no enforceable human-rights conditions linked to deliveries (European Commission). Human Rights Watch describes Azerbaijan as a repressive state (HRW). After Azerbaijan's 2023 offensive in Nagorno-Karabakh, the European Parliament, the EU's directly elected legislature, called for sanctions against Baku and urged the EU to end its gas dependence on Azerbaijan (Euronews). The Commission's energy diplomacy moved in the opposite direction.

There is another weakness in the story. Global Witness warned that Azerbaijan could increase exports to Europe partly by importing Russian gas for domestic use, freeing up Azerbaijani production for EU buyers (Global Witness). That is not proof that Russian gas is being relabelled. But it does make the claim of a clean break from Russian supply harder to sustain.

Europe has made Azerbaijan useful before making the relationship accountable. The take-or-pay clauses, which oblige buyers to pay whether or not they use the gas, along with price formulas and exit terms, remain unpublished. Until those terms are released, voters are being asked to accept that post-Russian diversification is not becoming another dependency, this time with better packaging.