He is challenging Social Democratic Chancellor Olaf Scholz and is currently the frontrunner for the position of Prime Minister. Friedrich Merz, chairman of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and head of the joint parliamentary group of the party and its sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU) in the Bundestag, returned to parliament in 2021 after a twelve-year hiatus. Now, as a candidate for Chancellor, he wants to succeed Scholz.
If he wins the German election on Sunday, February 23, the 69-year-old would be the oldest chancellor to take office since Konrad Adenauer, who took office in 1949 at the age of 73 as the first chancellor of the new Federal Republic of Germany.
Both Chancellor Scholz and his opponent Merz are lawyers, but they are completely different types. The senior CDU politician immediately catches the eye when he enters a room or takes the stage. In direct contact, he seems approachable and even humorous. However, when he leans too far into his interlocutors, as he often does, it does not always leave a favorable impression.
Two political lives
Merck essentially had two political lives – one before and one after East German politician Angela Merkel. When Merkel took power in the Christian Democratic Union in 2002 and then became chancellor in 2005, the much more conservative Merck withdrew. He was away from politics for years.
As early as 2001, he had put himself forward in discussions as a candidate for chancellor in the 2002 election. However, the Christian Democrats then opted for the Bavarian politician Edmund Stoiber, who ran against the Social Democratic Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and lost. Merz gradually withdrew from the political scene and returned to working as a lawyer. He has not run for the Bundestag since 2009.
Who is Friedrich Merz, the man who lost his battle with Angela Merkel and who returned to politics so late? He comes from the hilly region of Westphalia in western Germany. He is a Catholic and a lawyer, like his father. He still lives not far from where he was born. At the age of 33, he entered the European Parliament in 1989 as a CDU member, where he remained for five years. He then moved to the Bundestag, where he quickly gained a reputation as a good and sharp speaker. His words in the CDU/CSU parliamentary group carried weight.
Merc's exit from politics was a springboard into the business world. From 2005 to 2021, he worked at an international law firm and held leading positions on supervisory and management boards. From 2016 to 2020, he was chairman of the supervisory board of the German branch of the world's largest asset management company, BlackRock.
After Merkel announced her retirement from politics in 2021, Merck returned and gradually rose through the ranks. It was only on his third attempt that the Christian Democrats elected him party chairman in 2022. By then, he had built a reputation as an economically liberal representative of the conservative wing of the CDU.
"Problems with foreigners" and "little pashas"
Back in the 1997s, Merck spoke out in the Bundestag against the liberalization of abortion laws and against preimplantation genetic diagnosis. When parliament decided in XNUMX to treat marital rape as any other rape, Merck voted against the measure.
As a CDU MP, he was always in favor of the use of nuclear energy. He advocated a more liberal economic policy and a reduction in bureaucracy. As early as 25 years ago, he criticized Germany's migration policy, speaking of the "problem with foreigners" and insisting on the concept of a "leading culture".
He is raising some of these topics again – in changed political and social circumstances. At the beginning of 2023, he spoke about the lack of integration of foreigners in Germany. In the Markus Lanz show on the Second Channel of German Television (ZDF), he said: “There are people who actually have nothing to do in Germany, whom we have tolerated for a long time, whom we do not return or deport, and then we are surprised that such excesses occur.” He also claimed that fathers are taking away from teachers and professors, especially female professors, any authority over their children, who are actually “little shepherds.”
There is no longer any dissenting opinion among the top Christian Democratic party caucus regarding such statements. After years under Angela Merkel, many of her political comrades who advocated a more progressive course have left the party.
Conflict with Markus Zeder
The most resistance to Merck today comes from the sister party, the CSU. Their leader, Markus Söder, who lost the internal party fight for the chancellorship candidacy, does not miss an opportunity to goad him, despite many public statements of loyalty.
Since late summer 2024, Merck has lost some of his confidence and sovereignty. He has subsequently corrected his statements several times. On the Berlin political scene, however, he has managed to consolidate the new course of the Bundestag, as he claims. He says that he "initiated, guided and completed this process in the CDU in parallel, through the new party programmatic principle". His conclusion: "We are back on the right track."
This means that Merck is standing behind the much more conservative Christian Democrats. Just like 20 years ago, he is now reconsidering a return to nuclear energy and advocating a more restrictive migration policy. He claims that the era of Chancellor Scholz and the "traffic light coalition" is already a thing of the past and that it "did not fail just because of the liberals, but because the ruling coalition lacked a common basis for its work from the very beginning."
Merz wants to replace Scholz and his minority government. It remains open which coalition partners he will form a government with.
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