Friedrich Merz

Jens Schicke/Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo

Friedrich Merz on October 17, 2019 in front of the Marie-Elisabeth-Lueders-Haus in Berlin.

Overview – Skip to a certain paragraph:

☛ From Brilon to Bonn via Brussels: First Steps in Politics

☛ Opposition Leader after the Donations Affair

☛ Leading Thinker at Leipzig Party Conference

☛ On the Sidelines

☛ Successful Third Run at the Close of the Merkel Era

☛ Promising Opposition Leader?

From Brilon to Bonn via Brussels: First Steps in Politics

Friedrich Merz was born on 11 November 1955 in Brilon, a town in North Rhine-Westphalia. He was the eldest of four children in a Westphalian family of Huguenot ancestry with a strong tradition of legal practice. He is Roman Catholic. After completing secondary education (Abitur) and doing military service, he began studying law in 1976, first in Bonn and then in Marburg. In 1981, he married fellow trainee lawyer Charlotte Gass, with whom he would have three children. Following the Second State Examination in Law in 1985, Merz worked for a year as a judge at the Saarbrücken District Court, after which he became an in-house attorney at the Verband der Chemischen Industrie e.V. (Association of the German Chemical Industry).

Merz had been a member of the CDU since 1972. He was elected to the European Parliament in 1989, where he sat on the economic and monetary affairs committee. In the Bundestag election of 1994, Merz competed for the direct mandate from the constituency of Hochsauerlandkreis, which he won with an absolute majority — as he did in subsequent elections until 2005. While serving in the Bundestag, he was a member of the influential Finance Committee and, in 1996, head of the CDU/CSU group on the same committee. In that role, Merz was involved in drafting the ‘Petersberg Principles’ on tax policy with which the governing coalition under Helmut Kohl belatedly – and ultimately in vain – attempted to regain the initiative in the decade’s ongoing debate about Germany's perceived unattractiveness as a business location.

In the 1998 Bundestag election, the CDU/CSU and FDP coalition lost power to a coalition of Social Democrats and Greens led by Gerhard Schröder. Merz subsequently worked to modernize the CDU programme and bring new faces into its leadership. As the deputy chairman of the CDU/CSU Bundestag group (the chairman being Wolfgang Schäuble), he took the reins of fiscal and economic policy, winning acclaim as a confident antagonist of the SPD Ministers of Finance, Oskar Lafontaine and Hans Eichel.

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Opposition Leader after the Donations Affair

In the wake of the scandal involving unlawful donations to the CDU, the party's chairman at the federal and Bundestag levels, Wolfgang Schäuble, stepped down from office, whereupon the untainted Merz took over the chairmanship of the Bundestag group unopposed as his deputy in February 2000. He thus formed part of a dual CDU leadership with Angela Merkel as the new national chairwoman.

Clashes over the tax reform programme advocated by the SPD and Greens in the year 2000 turned into an ill-fated baptism of fire for the new group leader. Spurred on by CSU party leader Edmund Stoiber, the leaderships of the CDU/CSU pursued a strategy of confrontation. Ultimately, however, they suffered a painful defeat in the Bundesrat during its final session in Bonn, held in July 2000, because Chancellor Schröder had managed to win the support of state governments with CDU coalition partners.

Despite this defeat. Merz's standing in the Bundestag group and in the party was not harmed. There were enough other debates in which he bolstered the standing of the Union, which had become ethically tarnished by the donations scandal. For instance, he led the battle over cultural hegemony against the coalition of SPD and Greens and its media foot soldiers. Alongside conservative positions on bioethics and his examination of the militant past of Green ministers Joschka Fischer and Jürgen Trittin, he distinguished himself in heated debates on immigration, integration and right-wing extremism. In October 2000, Merz asserted that immigrants should declare their commitment to the liberal value system of Germany's Grundgesetz (the German constitution). His use of the phrase ‘deutsche Leitkultur’ (German guiding culture) – a concept that he had borrowed from political scientist Bassam Tibi – proved to be contentious. Even though he was, in essence, merely pointing out the need for undivided loyalty to the German constitution as the minimum consensus for the democratic identity of the Federal Republic and for the successful integration of immigrants, the choice of terminology provoked a highly emotional controversy.

In early 2001, at a time when party leader Angela Merkel was showing signs of weakness, Merz referred, in a slightly too presumptuous fashion, to the parliamentary group as the party's ‘centre of expertise’ and to the head of the parliamentary group — himself, in other words — as a conceivable candidate for the office of chancellor. It quickly became clear, however, that he did not have sufficient backing for this. Momentum lay instead with the minister president of Bavaria, Edmund Stoiber, whose party had proven to be an anchor of stability for the CDU/CSU alliance during the CDU donations scandal. At a meeting in Stoiber’s home town of Wolfratshausen, the party leaders Merkel and Stoiber agreed that the Bavarian minister president would run for chancellor as the CDU/CSU candidate in the Bundestag election of 2002. After Stoiber was narrowly defeated, Merkel claimed the leadership of the CDU/CSU Bundestag group for herself and Merz was left to assume his earlier position as deputy leader of the group — albeit with extensive responsibilities for economic, financial and social affairs.

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Leading Thinker at Leipzig Party Conference

Despite this setback, Merz would continue to play a prominent role over the following two years. His opportunity came in early 2003, when Chancellor Schröder bowed to the necessity of comprehensively reforming the welfare system and labour market. The government’s programme, bearing the name Agenda 2010, was introduced without regard to its freshly concluded coalition agreement. In the long term, it plunged the SPD into a near-terminal identity crisis. For its part, the CDU/CSU not only supported Schröder's proposals, but also exerted considerable influence on their form through the Union’s majority in the Bundesrat.

On the other hand, of course, the CDU/CSU did not want merely to serve as the willing tool of the embattled SPD chancellor. Two politicians in particular came to stand for the CDU's determination to lay out reforms of its own: the former German President Roman Herzog, who developed proposals for a structural reform of the social security systems, and Friedrich Merz, the author of an ambitious taxation model. Both men's proposals were adopted with overwhelming majorities at the CDU’s national party conference in the autumn of 2003. The star of the conference in Leipzig, Merz was at the height of his popularity. His vision of a tax return that would fit on a ‘beer mat’ became a popular symbol of the market-oriented convictions and aspirations of the CDU/CSU.

Unfortunately, the discussion in Leipzig had failed to take into account the Christian Democratic Employees' Association (CDA), which had found itself marginalized, and the CSU. In the final analysis, the compromises reached within the CDU/CSU in the course of 2004 significantly watered down Merz's tax plan, as a result of which he withdrew in disappointment from leadership positions in the parliamentary group and the party. He was sidelined completely after the early Bundestag elections of 2005, in which the CDU/CSU emerged as the winner by a wafer-thin margin under Merkel's leadership. In the grand coalition that resulted — a coalition in which the SPD was a nearly equal partner to the CDU/CSU — there was no room for Merz as a minister. In 2008, he announced that he would leave the Bundestag the following year and withdraw from active political life.

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On the Sidelines

While in the Bundestag, Merz had expanded his lucrative legal and consulting activities. After 2009, he nevertheless remained within hailing distance of politics in many of his roles. For ten years, for example, he served as chairman of the well-known Atlantik-Brücke association. In 2010-11, he was appointed to oversee the — ultimately unsuccessful — sale of the scandal-ridden Westdeutsche Landesbank. And in 2017, he became chairman of the supervisory board of the airport operator Flughafen Köln/Bonn GmbH. At the beginning of 2018, Minister President Armin Laschet named him Brexit commissioner in the new state government in North Rhine-Westphalia. From 2016 to 2020, Merz further solidified his reputation as an ideological bogeyman of the political left by serving as chairman of the supervisory board of BlackRock Asset Management Deutschland AG, the German branch of the largest asset management firm in the world. Whether as a delegate at CDU party conferences, a talk show guest, a speaker, or an author of books, he remained visible politically in the years after he left office, repeatedly offering critical counterpoints to the policies of the Merkel governments. From these different platforms, he opposed the anti-capitalist atmosphere prevailing in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, articulated fundamental criticism of the EU member states’ public debt and lax monetary policies, and likewise criticized the policies of EU member states during the refugee crisis of 2015.

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Successful Third Run at the Close of the Merkel Era

The moment for a political comeback came when Angela Merkel announced that she would give up the CDU national chairmanship in the late summer of 2018 and not run for chancellor in the Bundestag election of 2021. Merz immediately threw his hat into the ring and, in the first round of voting, edged out a rival much akin to himself, the Federal Minister of Health, Jens Spahn. In December 2018, at the national CDU conference in Hamburg, Merz won 48 percent of the delegate votes in the second round, losing by a slim margin to the former general secretary of the party, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer. Since Merz was not interested in standing for the executive committee, and was not eligible to join the cabinet in any case, he remained outside the new power structure.

In February 2020, however, Kramp-Karrenbauer decided not to stand for chancellor and indicated that she would step down as party leader, at which point Merz ran again. Once more, he was considered the candidate of the business wing and the more conservative state branches of the CDU/CSU, while Minister President Armin Laschet of North-Rhine Westphalia was deemed the candidate who would guarantee continuity. As he had done two years previously, Merz ran as an outsider who fired up his supporters. In view of the rising political fortunes of the Greens, however, his candidacy also invited the awkward question of what alliances he could forge as chairman of the party. At first, the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic seemed to play into Laschet's hands. But in the run-up to the party conference, which was ultimately scheduled for December 2020, neither Laschet nor Merz was able to position himself clearly as the natural successor to Merkel. Given that the leadership issue had been uncertain for years by this point, there was even widespread speculation as to whether the CSU leader and Bavarian Minister President Markus Söder might not be a more promising chancellor candidate.

In the course of the first digital CDU party conference, held on 16 January 2021, Merz won 385 votes to the 380 for his main rival, Armin Laschet, in the first round of voting. In the second round, however, Laschet succeeded in attracting more supporters of Norbert Röttgen, who had dropped out after the first round with only 224 votes. This pushed him ahead with 521 votes to Merz’s 466.

The Bundestag election of 2021 brought defeat for the Union and for Laschet as its chancellor candidate, but Merz returned to the German parliament with a direct mandate. Once again, he was immediately considered a contender for the position of party leader. This time, he was the man to beat, having worked to gain broader support for his third run. Instead of holding a vote at the party conference, the CDU asked its members to vote for the new party leader directly for the first time, and this made Merz, who was popular among the rank and file, the clear favourite. As expected, he was designated party leader in December 2021, having won 62 percent of the votes and left his rivals, Norbert Röttgen and Helge Braun, far behind.

At the digital party conference of the CDU on 22 January 2022, the delegates voted in the 66-year-old Merz as national chairman of the CDU with 94.62 percent in favour. His election was legally confirmed in the subsequent written ballot, in which Merz received 95.33 percent of the votes.

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Promising Opposition Leader?

Friedrich Merz’s political thinking has always been characterized by a clear preference for a liberalized social market economy, by a concept of European integration that emphasizes subsidiarity and clearly demarcated responsibilities for fiscal policy on the part of the member states, by a value-based Atlanticism, by a realistic approach to foreign policy, and by mainstream conservative values in matters of social policy. Throughout the Merkel era, for example, he represented many who felt dissatisfied with the direction of the CDU government and wanted the CDU/CSU to project a clearer image with greater doctrinal authority. By December 2021, when he was elected chairman, the CDU/CSU had come to the end of a long period in power and had unmistakably lost standing and credibility among voters on issues of economic, social and domestic policy. The majority of CDU members felt that Merz was the one who, as opposition leader, would best be able to highlight the political contrasts between the Union and the coalition of SPD, Greens and FDP, while strengthening its cultural identity.

Under Merz, the CDU/CSU has the chance to regain its bearings, its appeal and its ability to set the agenda – and to translate that into votes. To be weighed against this possibility is the risk of ruling itself out as a potential coalition partner. Which way the pendulum swings will depend in part on how strong the cohesion and ability to overcome inherent differences are within the coalition of SPD, Greens and FDP. Merz may be able to develop credible policy alternatives and succeed as opposition leader by taking advantage of a number of failings: increased interventionism in economic, energy and climate policy; the absence of viable or sustainable measures for monetary, fiscal and social policy; continued weakness in foreign policy; unresolved problems with regard to migration and integration, and the inadequate response to the coronavirus pandemic. This will require him to bring across the inherent benefits of a liberal, business-oriented economic policy for addressing not just social issues, but the climate crisis as well. At the same time, his success will depend on whether, under his leadership, the CDU/CSU can expand its relevance to changing lifestyles and social backgrounds. Finally, Merz will have to re-establish the Union as a party that is credible and pragmatic, a party which, with a sober view of the realities of life, aims for the limited but effective exercise of governmental power.

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The original text was translated by Richard Toovey.