In July 2022, the prevailing political mood in Germany was grim. The economic powerhouse was on the brink of a recession, with Russia threatening to cut off its gas supplies. There were widespread fears of a decline in prosperity. The gloss was beginning to wear off Olaf Scholz’s coalition government.
Amid the gloom, the finance minister, Christian Lindner, got married on the North Sea island of Sylt. And one of the guests, Friedrich Merz, decided to make his entrance at the opulent, three-day celebration in his private plane: a twin-engine Diamond DA62, complete with personalised number plate.
The leader of the centre-right opposition party the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) was roundly criticised for the ostentatious arrival, both for flaunting his wealth and ignoring concerns over the climate crisis. Far from being chastened, however, Merz doubled down.
“I use less fuel with this small aircraft than any company car owned by a member of the federal government,” he insisted – and for that reason, he said, he would continue to fly at every opportunity.
With his conservative alliance leading the polls, Merz is now preparing to take control of the cockpit as the chancellor of Europe’s largest economy, anticipating triumph in elections called for 23 February. In a country where brazen shows of wealth are unusual and unpopular, however, his plane use – and image of privilege – may yet come back to bite him.
Hailed by his supporters as the “back to the roots” candidate, Merz is a textbook Christian Democrat in the way Germany’s last conservative chancellor, Angela Merkel, was not.
The 69-year-old is an apparently role-model husband of more than 40 years, a father and grandfather, as well as a Catholic by birth who still lives in Brilon, the west German town in which he was born. His profile could hardly be more of a contrast to Merkel, a twice-married, child-free Protestant woman who grew up in the communist GDR.
Their trajectories within the CDU also differ: unlike Merkel, who led her party to success after electoral success, Merz’s popularity ratings within the party have sometimes been so bad they have considered booting him out.
These days, though, he is viewed as something of a knight in shining armour whose time might have finally come. Well-versed in the highs and lows of political life, he was famously sidelined by Merkel when he tried to break into the top echelons of the party in the early 2000s, reacting angrily, as one witness recalled, like a “headless chicken”.
He returned only years later, once she had left the political scene, after a lucrative career in investment banking, with a pilot’s licence, and several million euros of wealth under his belt, to – as his supporters put it – save the party.
Scepticism about Merz was rife, especially among the grassroots party faithful who resented the fact they had been doing the hard graft while he had been making his fortune as chair of the supervisory board of BlackRock Asset Management Germany, a subsidiary of the US giant.
Re-elected as an MP in 2021, it took him three attempts to be voted party leader. He finally succeeded and since January 2022 has been Germany’s main opposition leader and Scholz’s bete noire. As the government struggled with myriad challenges Merz became expert at rubbing salt into the wounds of the ailing “traffic light” alliance.
Defining himself to voters will be one of the main challenges Merz faces before election day. Although now his name is much discussed, for the best part of two decades he attracted little interest. He describes himself as driven, punctual, hard-working and direct. His critics say he is thin-skinned, quick-tempered and arrogant.
Merz is arguably best known for his suggestion in the early 2000s that German tax rules be drastically reduced so that they fit on the back of a beer coaster. The very same coaster on which he scribbled the policy is now preserved in the archives of Germany’s House of History in Bonn.
The incident “had a certain charm about it”, Mariam Lau, a commentator with Die Zeit, said in a recent documentary, Mensch Merz! The Challenger. “But it was also the affected performance of a populist.”
That label is one he will struggle to shake during the election campaign. Merz has also made headlines for xenophobic remarks about rejected asylum seekers (“social tourists” who come to Germany to “get their teeth done”) and for using the phrase “little pashas” to refer to children with a migration background. He apologised for the first, and said he was repeating the words of his constituents when he used the second. By then, however, the comments had gone viral.
Such flashes of populism, taken alongside the image of privilege conjured up by his private plane use, are among Merz’s distinguishing marks – and before the election, the Social Democrats in particular are “likely to try to degrade the CDU boss to the status of a German Trump”, Lau predicted in a recent essay.
Merz has said he is committed to sticking to Germany’s strict debt-brake rules, ideological disagreements over which led to the collapse of the coalition earlier this month. But to what extent he will be able to govern without reforming the rules to allow more borrowing to cover emergency costs (namely for Ukraine) remains to be seen.
Merz is a staunch supporter of Ukraine, insisting Germany’s backing of Kyiv will not wane under his watch. Unlike Scholz, he has said he would back an increase in Ukraine’s capacity to strike Russian territory, and on a visit to Kyiv on Monday told Vlodomyr Zelenskyy he would provide Kyiv with the long-range Taurus missiles it has doggedly been requesting of Berlin. “With these range limits, we are forcing your country to fight with one hand tied behind your back,” he told the Ukrainian president.
The distance between Merkel and Merz remains considerable. While he has somewhat softened his criticism of her, in particular her so-called open door policy which allowed more than a million refugees into Germany in 2015, he still maintains the line: “That should not be allowed to happen again,”and has pushed for the closing of Germany’s borders.
His main challenge is probably the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which rose in popularity on the back of the refugee crisis, and, running second in the polls to the conservative CDU/CSU alliance, wants to be the junior partner in a coalition with it.
Merz, who started out as an MEP in 1989, has repeatedly and passionately rejected the idea, but there are those within the party who are pushing for collaboration. He is aware that the AfD are his greatest competitors, and has been warned by those in the more liberal wing of the CDU to not adopt their tactics.
“We might be in competition with the populists, but we should not turn their methods into our own,” Hendrik Wüst, the leader of North Rhine-Westphalia and one of Merz’s main rivals, has cautioned him.
In an effort to draw the line under any disputes, Merz recently told supporters at a rally he was a patriot. “The nationalist may love his own country, but he hates everyone else,” he said to warm applause. “The patriot loves his country and respects everyone else.” Merz will be hoping that, by February, his country loves him back.
