Will new German Chancellor Friedrich Merz fly too close to the sun?
The new German Chancellor waited two decades for his colleague and great rival Angela Merkel to depart the scene. The more conservative Merz is finally “the boss” and free to put his more muscular stamp on Germany.
In The Right Stuff, the classic book about pilots who took part in the American space program, Tom Wolfe wrote about the qualities these men shared, namely supreme confidence and a disregard for convention. He described how flying gave them a sense of freedom from the mundane, along with a matching feeling of superiority. Feeling “utterly free of the Earth”, they would look down on the masses, wondering “if they had the faintest idea of what it was like” up there.
There is something evocative of this in Friedrich Merz, an avid pilot who is also something of a cavalier. Before Merz became Germany’s Chancellor, his love of being “up there” caused an uproar. In 2022 he was photographed in the cockpit of his private plane, having just flown it to the German holiday island of Sylt for a colleague’s wedding.
For Merz’s detractors, it illustrated his arrogance and elitism, not to mention an enormous carbon footprint due to his habit of forgoing his entitlement to free train travel and flying his plane between Berlin and his constituency. Unflustered, Merz laughed it off, saying he regretted nothing, and that his “little plane uses less fuel than any company car used by members of the government”.
He has described flying to Berlin as “the best hour of his day” and he clearly spends time thinking about it. In an interview this year he said “once you have learned how to fly, you walk the Earth with your gaze constantly skyward. You’ve been there and you always want to return.”
There are many aspects of Merz’s character and background that mark him out as a high-flyer not overly concerned with the conventions that apply to those on the ground. What makes his story more interesting is that while he always seemed destined for great heights, his path to the top has been a series of dramatic peaks and troughs. Perhaps because of this, he now clearly wants to make it count.
Consider how much Merz has done since assuming office on May 6 this year. He has broken numerous taboos by pushing through an enormous increase to defence spending, exempting it from Germany’s constitutional mechanism limiting government borrowing, and he has stationed a German armoured brigade in Lithuania, the first permanent foreign deployment of German troops since 1945. He has met, and held his own, with Donald Trump three times, provoked outrage over his strong and blunt support of Israeli and American strikes on Iran, and signed a landmark defence treaty with Britain.
The pace at which he is moving, and the willingness to do and say things that his predecessors would not, is unsurprising given how long he waited to become chancellor. Merz will turn 70 in November, but he began his political career at a young age and spent a significant amount of time in the political wilderness.
Elected to the German Bundestag in 1994, he rose quickly to leadership positions in the conservative Christian Democratic Union.
Even then Merz did not appear to feel that convention applied to him. Merz’s party leader, chancellor Helmut Kohl, then already a political colossus having been chancellor for more than a decade and overseeing German reunification, ran the party like his own fiefdom. Kohl would address members with the informal and, in this context, disrespectful “du” while insisting they address him with the formal and respectful “Sie”. Merz, mid-30s and freshly elected to his first term, would not stand for this and insisted on being addressed formally. In the ensuing row he allegedly said to Kohl: “I can lose 10 per cent of the vote in my electorate and will still be here, but if you lose 1 per cent you are gone.”
Merz kicked against policy developments within his party and was very much his own man. While other junior CDU politicians were moving to the centre, even meeting the Greens to discuss possible coalitions, Merz forged an image as an arch-conservative, a finance expert and a future party leader. Soon, however, a CDU colleague who was his polar opposite emerged as a rival: Angela Merkel.
Merkel was a modest, centrist, cautious and compromising ex-scientist from the former East. Merz was a brash lawyer from the West who was gaffe-prone, blunt and believed “provocation can cause a real debate and perhaps a real development”. They did not get along.
Merkel wrote in her memoirs that “there was one problem, right from the start: we both wanted to be boss”, while Merz has said “there are just some people who do not suit one another”. When Merkel outmanoeuvred Merz for the party leadership in 2002, he was, according to Merkel, “cut to the quick”. He gradually withdrew from politics, eventually leaving parliament in 2009.
Merz reached new, far more lucrative heights in the private sector. He specialised in corporate finance as a partner in a law firm and sat on numerous boards, most notably as chairman of the German arm of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset management firm. It is not clear exactly how wealthy he became. Wealthy enough to buy a plane, anyway.
Merz made an unexpected return to politics in 2018 after Merkel announced she would not seek re-election. Again, he had numerous stumbles. He lost leadership ballots in 2018 and again in early 2021 before finally taking over the party in 2022 and leading the CDU to an election victory this year. Even then he faced another setback, losing the first vote in parliament to confirm him as chancellor. Usually a formality, it was the first time this had happened since World War II.
Since assuming office, Merz has shaken up Germany’s place in the world, not only with the pace and scale at which he is operating but also with his personal style.
The man with the front to challenge Kohl and who later swam with the sharks of international finance is clearly comfortable saying what he thinks on the global stage and standing up to other world leaders.
The contrast with his predecessors and the break from a political culture of caution and deliberation is remarkable.
Merz has summarised his approach to foreign policy by stating that it requires not just diplomacy but also “analytical clarity”.
His statement at the G7 meeting in June praising Israel for “doing the dirty work for the rest of us” caused a furore. It dominated headlines for days and there were even members of the Left party who filed criminal charges against him for violating the German constitution, which forbids “wars of aggression”. Journalists questioned Merz numerous times whether he regretted or wanted to qualify what he had said. His answer was always the same: “Nein.”
He was just as forthright on the subsequent US strikes on Iran, seeing “no reason to criticise what America did”. His approach contrasts even with his colleagues; his Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul called US military action “regrettable”.
Merz also clearly thinks he can handle Trump. Merz notes that “the chemistry works” but is clearly not afraid to disagree with him publicly. In his meeting in the White House in June, he pushed back on Trump’s assertion that Russia and Ukraine were like “two kids fighting in a playground”, saying he wanted America to put more pressure on Russia and that his personal view was clear: “we are on the side of Ukraine”.
For his part, Trump seems to respect him. Merz’s huge increases in German defence spending are a key factor why. It also could be his direct manner, his experience as a corporate deal-maker or that he is not Merkel, who Trump rubbished several times in their meeting. It probably also helps that Merz is very tall.
After such a fast start, many of the longer-term obstacles Merz will need to overcome will be internal. He will need to hold together a fragile coalition with the centre-left Social Democrats and also will have to see off the far-right Alternative for Germany, which won the second highest number of votes in the election and which opposes rearmament and Merz’s staunch support of Ukraine and NATO.
To achieve these defence goals, he also will need to continue to convince the German public of their necessity.
Rearmament and involvement in “the east” are still difficult topics in Germany, and while Merz acknowledges that there is a deep-seated fear of war because of the horrors of the first half of the 20th century, he is trying to make a break from the more recent decades, where he says Germany was “operating under the delusion that peace in Europe would be permanently guaranteed almost automatically”. To do so, he is blunt in pointing out that Russia’s war is not just against Ukraine; he has said “Russia is already attacking us” because of its espionage, sabotage and other forms of hybrid warfare that Germany must defend itself against.
If Merz succeeds it will be largely due to whatever it is within him that has set him apart as a political cavalier and driven him through decades of ups and downs on the path to power. But this approach has its risks. Will Merz fly too close to the sun?
As Wolfe wrote about those aviators who crashed and burned, “There are no accidents and no fatal flaws in the machinery; there are only pilots with the wrong stuff.”
Bryce Sait is a Sydney-based historian and author of The Indoctrination of the Wehrmacht: Nazi Ideology and the War Crimes of the German Military.
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