If you want to drop column(s) from the target data frame, but the column(s) are required for the join, you can do the following:
df1 = df1.merge(df2[['a', 'b', 'key1']], how = 'left',
left_on = 'key2', right_on = 'key1').drop('key1')
The .drop('key1')
part will prevent 'key1' from being kept in the resulting data frame, despite it being required to join in the first place.