Friedrich Merz, president of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), believes he deserves the next German chancellor after the general election on Feb. 23.
At the party’s last convention before the vote, he showed confidence in the face of a political storm he unleashed in January when he tried to pass a difficult bill in parliament with the far-right populist election for Germany (AFD).
The move sent shockwaves across the country, with protesters provoking collaboration as an unprecedented violation of the post-war taboo on cooperating with the right.
Merz himself sees his move as a bid to curtail the good fortune of the anti-immigration Afd.
Its right-wing central bloc (CDU/CSU) has long led in opinion polls at around 30%, making Merz the challenger to Chancellor Olaf Scholz of the Social Democrats of the Left (SPD).
An election victory would end a remarkable comeback for Merz, who joined the Bundestag in 2021 after a 12-year hiatus from politics.
If elected, the 69-year-old would be the longest-serving chancellor since Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor of Germany’s new Federal Republic, who took over in 1949 at the age of 73.
Scholz and Merz are trained lawyers, however, the similarity ends there. The wonderful CDU politician is a demanding figure, whether he walks into a room or gets on stage. In person, he presents himself as approachable and even humorous, although he doesn’t. Make the most productive impression by leaning over to communicate with people, as you do occasionally.
When Angela Merkel rose to lead the CDU MP in 2002 and entered the chancellorship in 2005, the much more conservative Merz retired and distanced himself from politics for years.
Compared to Merkel, who he noted as a calm and calculating tactician, Merz is seen as a different kind of politician, much more willing to take political risks.
Merz was seen as Merkel’s rival in the early 2000s. Until 2001, he ran as a candidate for chancellor for the 2002 federal election. But at that time, the CDU elected Bavarian politician Edmund Stoiber, who opposed Social Democratic Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, and lost. Merz gradually moved away from the political arena and returned to his paintings as a lawyer. In 2009, it was no longer the status as a candidate for the Bundestag.
Merz is from Sauerland, a low-mountain region in West Germany, and is Catholic and a lawyer, like his father before him. To this day, he lives not far from where he was born. In 1989, at the age of 33, he became a member of the European Parliament of the CDU.
Merz’s departure from politics followed through a building in the personal sector. From 2005 to 2021, the component of a foreign law company and assumed supervisory and administrative positions. From 2016 to 2020, the Chairman of the Supervisory Board of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, in Germany.
But when Merkel announced she would leave politics in 2021, Merz returned and rose through the ranks. The CDU elected him party leader in 2022 on his third attempt. He had a reputation as the liberal economic representative of the conservative wing of the CDU.
Merz had already voted against the liberalisation of abortion and opposed pre-implantation genetic diagnosis in the Bundestag in 1990. He also infamously voted against the criminalization of marital rape in 1997.
He was in favor of nuclear force and was driven by a more liberal economic policy and a relief in the bureaucracy. guiding culture” in Germany.
Now it is raising some of these problems, with Germany in a different political and social situation. In the political communication, Muestra Markus Lanz in January 2023, he complained about the lack of integration in Germany, arguing that there were “people who have no business in Germany, whom we have tolerated here for a long time, whom we do not send back, whom we do not deport, and then we are surprised that there are such excesses. “”Parents,” he said, “denied teachers,” denied teachers, especially teachers, any authority over their children, whom he described as “little pashas. “
This attracted a lot of controversy at the time, now you don’t hear much contradiction with such statements from the most sensible CDU. After the end of the Merkel years, many of the former chancellor’s political associates left.
The CDU leader is the maximum likely to face the headwinds of Bavaria’s sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU). With a strong media presence, its leader Markus Söder, as he lost the race to be a candidate for chancellor in 2021, has boosted Merz, Despite common expressions of loyalty, Merz has since lost part of its sovereignty since last summer and has been found running some of its own statements.
On the Berlin stage, however, he made sure that the parliamentary organization, as he puts it, redefined its course in key spaces of German politics. It has also initiated, pushed and terminated this procedure in the CDU with the new fundamental programme. “His conclusion: “This puts us back on the right track. “
Merz now represents a CDU that has become much more conservative, his own positions having replaced just over 20 years. It is now contemplating a return to nuclear force and, beyond January, it tried to secure a more restrictive migration policy in Parliament.
In the hours after Scholz’s coalition between the SPD, Greens and FDP collapsed in November, Merz said that the “gentle traffic coalition” is now a thing of the past: “Gentle traffic has been history since last night. Due only to the FDP, but due to the lack of a non-unusual basis for a government alliance from the beginning. “
Merz will update Scholz and his minority government, however, it remains to be seen which coalition partners he will paint to do so with.
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This article was originally written in German and was first published in November 2024 when Friedrich Merz has emerged as his party’s most sensitive candidate. Since then, it has been up to date to reflect newer developments.
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