Who is Friedrich Merz? The German Front that was flirting with a far right

He is the man dedicated to the next German leader: an antidote to the crisis of trust in Europe, his supporters say.

Friedrich Merz is a familiar face of the old security of his Conservative Party. Politically, he has never met as exciting.

However, his explosive application for tightening the migration rules with the support of far -right votes in parliament reveals a person ready to bet, violating a large taboo.

He also notes another clear breakthrough from the more central position of the party of his Christian Democratic Union (CDU) under his former rival Angela Merkel.

Although Mertz in the end failed to change the law, he started lightning in the election campaign challenged by A collapse of the government of Chancellor Olaf Skolz At the end of last year.

Known aside from Merkel, before she became Chancellor, he left the parliament entirely to pursue a profitable series of corporate jobs and was written off as yesterday’s man.

But there is a feeling of inevitable that this 69-year-old return can be at the top of the attraction of the work he has wished for so long.

This is January 23, one month until the German federal elections and people have gathered at one of the five -star hotels in Berlin to hear Merz exporting foreign policy speech.

The buzz around the “ballroom” at Hotel de Rome is not exactly electric – but this is far from 20 years ago when his political career was looking.

Mertz is also a licensed pilot who in 2022 has attracted criticism for flying the Northern German Island on his private aircraft for the wedding of a colleague politician Christian Lindner.

As he took the stage at Hotel De Rome, there are polite applause for the leader of the conservative opposition of the UDF of Germany, who consistently progress into the urns.

Tall, thin, in a suit and glasses, Mertz cuts off a calm, conventional, business similar figure while trying to design a willingness for power.

But it was a meandering trip to get to this point.

Merz was born in the Western German city of Brilon in 1955 in a prominent conservative, Catholic family.

His father serves as a local judge, as well as the wife of Friedrich Mertz Charlotte to this day.

The younger mertz joined the CDU while still in school.

In an interview 25 years ago, with the German newspaper Tagesspiegel, he claimed to be a more distant youth than his CV, bound by a strait.

Among his abuses, he describes racing on the streets of a motorcycle, hanging himself with friends from a chip stand and playing the game with cards Double -head in the back of the class.

A teenage party, which he pointed out, ended with a group of students who take a team at the school aquarium, according to Der Spiegel.

There is some skepticism that teenage Merz was a large part of a plant. A former classmate recalled that the destructive behavior of the young Friedrich is more often pleased with the fact that he just wants the “last word”.

Whether they are on or out of the record, the people who know it told me that they enjoyed beer and can really be fun, although few managed to offer an anecdote to illustrate this.

After school, he continued to be involved in military service before studying the right and married student Charlotte Gass in 1981.

The couple has three children.

For several years, Mertz has worked as a lawyer, but has always been looking at politics and was elected in the European Parliament in 1989, at 33 years old.

“And we were quite young and very fresh and let’s say intact,” says Dagmar Roth-Bahrendt, who became a MEP at the same time for the Social Democratic Party of Germany on the left at the Center (SPD).

She found the young Mertz a serious, reliable, honest and polite.

Even humorous – a quality that she thinks is less obvious now: “I guess the amount of bruises over time can hardly hardened it.”

But he came across his career as a potential chancellor?

“I would probably say no, no way. Come on, you have to be kidding me!”

Still, everyone knew him to be deeply ambitious, and Mertz soon moved from EU policy to the National Parliament of Germany, Bundestag, in 1994.

It rose through the ranks, advertised as a talent for the more well-known, traditional party faction.

“He is a wonderful speaker and a deep thinker,” says Klaus-Pistter Wilsh, a member of the Bundestag CDU, who has known him for more than 30 years.

“Fighter,” says Wilsh, testifies to the fact that Mertz made three attempts to lead his party.

His first two failures, in 2018 and January 2021, can also be read as a sign of his struggle for courting the main ones.

But it was in the early channels, when his ambitions were originally derailled, he lost to Angela Merkel in a party struggle for power.

Merkel, the reduced quantum chemist from the former Communist East, and Merz, the candid lawyer from the West, never saw many face to face.

Mertz bets on this bitter episode in a short autobiographical post on the CDU website, saying that until 2009 he decided to leave parliament to “make room for reflection.”

His years of reflection include the creation of a career in the field of finance and corporate law – he became the executive director of the meeting room in various international companies and, a well -known millionaire.

It would have been more than a decade before returning to parliament, where he has since sought to tear apart Merkel’s more centered doctrine about CDU Conservatism.

At the end of last month, a remarkable moment of political compensation appeared when Friedrich Mertz pushed a non-binding proposal on stricter immigration rules, relying on voices from the final alternative alternative Für Deutschland (AFD).

He insisted that he had no direct cooperation with AFD, but his move led to mass protests and was twice condemned by no one but Merkel herself.

These are rare public interventions from the woman who has ruled Germany for 16 years.

Detractors claim that it was an unforgivable election gambit that would only benefit AFD, but supporters insist that Mertz actually strives to lure people skillfully from the far right.

He risked the alienation of more measured parts of the electorate, voting in the 1990s against a bill that included the criminalization of marriage rape.

Later, he explained that he considered the marital rape an already crime, and in the bill he objected.

The polls suggest that he is not particularly popular with young people and women – but Klaus Pistter Wilsh believes that the picture he painted in German media is unfair.

“I had it several times in my constituency,” he tells me. “Then the women come and say he is a nice person.”

Charlotte Merz has also turned to his defense, telling Westfalenpost: “What some people write about the image of my husband of the women is just not true.”

She says their marriage was one of the mutual support: “We both took care of each other and divided the care of the children in such a way that it was compatible with our professional duties.”

Its popularity will be put to the test of the election approaching, and also as speculation focuses less on whether they will win more and more on whom they can form a coalition.

Some observers are afraid of trust among potential coalition partners have been damaged by Mertz’s experimental approach to tacit cooperation with AFD, a party insisting that it will never rule.

Whatever the criticism, an EU diplomat told me that Brussels “was awaiting his arrival” anxiously.

“It’s time to go from this German dead end and start this engine.”