Who is Friedrich Merz, the favourite to become Germany’s next chancellor?
The 69-year-old is on the cusp of claiming a prize he has been seeking for a lifetime - but his alliance with the AfD to get a vote through has raised eyebrows.
When Friedrich Merz first ran for the leadership of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) six years ago, he had been in the wilderness for so long that he worried even political obsessives might no longer remember his surname.
“It’s Merz, with an E,” he said, just in case anyone were to mistake it for März, the German word for March.
No one has that problem now. Today Merz, 69, stands on the cusp of the chancellorship, a prize he has been seeking for a lifetime and came close to grasping before only to be outmanoeuvred by Angela Merkel.
He also stands accused of cynically taking a jackhammer to the “firewall” that is supposed to neuter Alternative for Germany (AfD). The right-wing party played the decisive role in hauling Merz to victory in an asylum vote in the Bundestag.
Two days later he stood at the same lectern and recycled an inaccurate AfD claim about “daily” incidents of gang rape by asylum seekers as he tried to pass a law to restrict immigration, again with the backing of the radical right.
This time, however, his gambit backfired and the bill was defeated by 12 votes.
Rolf Mützenich, the parliamentary leader of the ruling Social Democratic Party (SPD), told Merz he had “damaged the essential veins of our democracy”, likening him to the conservatives who had disastrously attempted to work with Adolf Hitler in the dying days of the Weimar republic.
He is under attack not only from the usual suspects on the centre left but also from Angela Merkel, the Protestant and Roman Catholic churches and a barrage of hostile briefings from some of his own MPs. The closer he gets to the election on February 23, the more the questions are piling up about whether Merz truly has the skill set, character and judgment required to lead Germany and Europe through their most testing period in at least half a century.
There is no doubting his determination or his readiness to slaughter sacred cows. His recipe for shaking Germany out of its current slump has barely changed since he set it out in a book five years ago: “Do we have the strength and the will once again to give our country a fresh impetus, to let a fresh dynamism blossom, to find joy in the new and the unknown, to take risks, to make mistakes and yet not to give up — in short, to rethink what Germany is?”
Merz’s allies and admirers list his finer qualities: his boldness, his rhetorical vigour, his ruthlessness, his depth of business experience, his moral clarity on support for Ukraine, his instinctive grasp of where the balance of public opinion lies.
Andreas Rödder, a history professor who oversaw the wholesale revision of the CDU’s program of “fundamental values” under Merz, describes him as the antithesis of Olaf Scholz, the circumspect and technocratic chancellor.
“In some ways Merz can be a kind of anti-politician,” Rödder said. “Scholz is the epitome of the politician as functionary, sticking to the usual routines. But Merz is a person who at a critical moment can act quite emotionally and daringly, and completely junk these routines.”
Merz’s critics, however, maintain that each of these characteristics has a shadow side. The boldness, they say, shades into thin-skinned recklessness; the magniloquence into bombast and provocation; the 16 corporate board posts on his CV into cosiness with vested interests; and the pursuit of the popular into naked populism.
Many voters share this wariness of Merz. His party may be ahead in the polls but his personal approval ratings are middling at best.
There is a lingering suspicion that the multi-millionaire corporate lawyer, who flies around the country in his own private plane, has no real empathetic understanding of just how hard-pressed many German household budgets are.
He is often portrayed by his opponents as a dinosaur whose view of society has barely altered since the last century. More to the point, he has less experience of government than any post-war German chancellor, which is to say: none. The best way to judge how much merit there is in these criticisms is to visit the Sauerland, a Catholic and deeply conservative patch of rolling hill country between Dortmund and Kassel, where Merz has lived for almost his entire life.
The region remains his lodestar to such a degree that locals say he still religiously dons the cap of his home town’s shooting club and takes part in an biennial tradition in which 2000 men beat the bounds of its medieval towns, slosh back litres of pilsner and read out municipal contracts from the high Middle Ages.
Merz’s childhood in Brilon, a medium-sized rural spa town, was a world away from the present. His primary school split boys and girls in the playground and made them use separate entrances. None of the roads were paved and many houses still had dung heaps outside their front doors. When a baby was born, the head of the family would grab his hunting rifle and fire it into the air: one bullet for a girl, two for a boy.
By all accounts Merz had a rough time at his grammar school, answering back to his teachers and getting such poor grades that his father, an austere lawyer and Wehrmacht veteran who had spent four years in a Soviet prisoner of war camp, suggested he become a builder.
“His mother told me that up to year ten he basically didn’t do any work, he didn’t do much at all. He was lazy, bored and got stupid ideas,” said Gereon Fritz, 82, a friend of the Merz family and former headmaster of the school.
After Merz failed his end-of-year exams, though, Fritz said the boy switched schools and became a different person. “He breathed a sigh of relief, he learnt to play the trombone, the clarinet, the drums … And he very quickly became the representative of his class and head boy, and got involved in the Junge Union.”
It was in the Junge Union — the CDU’s youth wing — that Merz found his feet and a sense of political orientation that would shape him to the present day, in the midst of a heated conflict with the Social Democratic party (SPD) government of the day and a wave of militant leftism following the upheaval of 1968.
“I think he has kept his appreciation for what is essential and his willingness and courage for change,” said Johannes Slawig, 69, an old CDU sparring partner of Merz from this period. “He is not someone who wants to manage, in the sense of organising what already exists, but rather he is someone who wants to initiate change.
“He is also quite willing to reflect critically and self-critically. He doesn’t just accept things but questions whether there is a justification, if there needs to be change, or if you can move beyond something.”
Ludger Schindler, 65, one of Merz’s childhood neighbours, said his rootedness in the area was a good reason to trust his political integrity.
“The Sauerland is a very conservative area and you can take people by their word,” he said. “That’s why I say that I believe it when Friedrich says that he won’t enter into a coalition with the AfD. When he says the firewall will not come down, then it won’t.”
After a law degree and several years as a junior judge and solicitor for the German chemical industry’s lobby group, Merz was elected to the European parliament in 1989 and then to the Bundestag in 1994.
These were the last glory days of the CDU as it used to be in the 20th century, a patriarchal and boundlessly self-confident party under the leadership of Helmut Kohl, Merz’s political idol and the chancellor who had reunified Germany.
After the long Kohl era fell to pieces at the end of the Nineties, many expected Merz to inherit the crown. As the CDU opposition leader in the Bundestag, he savaged the SPD government with aplomb and notoriously coined the idea of an income tax system so simple it could be sketched out on a beer mat.
Yet he misjudged the shifting balance of power in the party and was comprehensively outfoxed by Merkel. Rather than play second fiddle to his nemesis, he withdrew from frontline politics altogether and took up a series of lucrative posts in corporate boardrooms.
There are those who argue that this background has made him too close to the interests of the business establishment, and in particular to BlackRock, the vast US asset management conglomerate whose German arm Merz chaired from 2016 to 2020.
Some of Merz’s former colleagues from these years are also dismissive of his capabilities and in particular of his appetite for detail.
However, Carsten Maschmeyer, a billionaire investor and one of the judges on Germany’s version of Dragon’s Den, said this experience was precisely what the country needed in a chancellor.
“We are facing a massive economic challenge: two years of recession, crippling bureaucracy and a politics that hinders entrepreneurs more than it helps them,” he said. “Now especially we need someone who understands where growth comes from, what businesses need and how jobs are secured. Friedrich Merz has proven over decades that he has precisely this expertise.”
Throughout this time there were right-wing networks in the CDU that grew irritated with Merkel’s increasingly liberal course and came to see Merz as a kind of king over the water, a standard-bearer of what they saw as the party’s true conservative values.
In 2018, as Merkel’s grip on the party faltered and then broke after a series of poor state election results, Merz seized his opportunity and campaigned to replace her. Twice he was defeated by Merkel’s preferred candidates, despite commanding overwhelming support from the party base.
After the CDU limped to a dispiriting defeat in the 2021 election, however, Merz could no longer be held back. Many MPs who had earned their spurs in the Merkel era dreaded his return and the impending lurch to the right; some even privately threatened to split the party rather than let Merz drag it on to the AfD’s terrain.
Yet he has proven a lucky general. Awkward episodes that would have felled a less ebullient politician have slipped off Merz like grease from a Teflon pan: an off-the-cuff remark that linked homosexuality to pedophilia, a reference to raucous teenagers from migrant backgrounds as “little pashas” that compared them to pampered Ottoman officials and most seriously a battering by the AfD at three east German state elections last autumn.
Despite this last setback the Merkelian resistance dissipated and the once-mutinous party fell obediently into line behind Merz as its candidate for the chancellorship.
LOOKS LIKE THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY IN GERMANY HAS WON THE VERY BIG AND HIGHLY ANTICIPATED ELECTION. MUCH LIKE THE USA, THE PEOPLE OF GERMANY GOT TIRED OF THE NO COMMON SENSE AGENDA, ESPECIALLY ON ENERGY AND IMMIGRATION, THAT HAS PREVAILED FOR SO MANY YEARS. THIS IS A GREAT DAY…
— Donald J. Trump Posts From His Truth Social (@TrumpDailyPosts) February 23, 2025
The hallmark of his leadership is the palpable delight that Merz and his inner circle take in an almost British style of adversarial politics, setting off rhetorical fireworks and distancing themselves from the centre left.
Nowhere is this clearer than in their approach to the asylum question, where they are not only fully prepared for an open conflict with Brussels but also envisage a grand bargain with right-wing governments across the EU to rewire the entire European system.
The joy and willingness in setting out clear positions and fighting for them was always one of Friedrich Merz’s calling cards,” said Volker Bouffier, a CDU grandee who has known him for decades. “This attitude reflects the expectations of a broad majority of the population who want clear positions from their politicians.”
This may be true. Others in the party, however, worry that Merz may have pushed things too far and snatched defeat from the jaws of victory with his asylum stunt this week.
They fret that his flirtation with the AfD means that other parties of the centre will refuse to form a coalition with the CDU after the election, because they no longer trust him.
Were that to happen, German politics would descend into bedlam. One scenario doing the rounds in Berlin is a Merz-led minority government propped up by ad-hoc majorities, which would leave him at the mercy of the AfD.
In this atmosphere of unpredictability, one thing is certain: the next few weeks will change Germany.
The Times
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout