From serial loser to Germany's next chancellor?
Friedrich Merz seems to have beaten off challenges from inside the CDU to be their next chancellor candidate.
Dear Reader
It was December 2018. Outside the convention centre in downtown Hamburg it was a damp and mild day. Inside, Friedrich Merz was hot under the collar.
The man who had been in self-imposed exile from politics for a decade was delivering a speech to the CDU party conference that was supposed to seal his shock return at the head of the centre-right party, just as his old nemesis, Angela Merkel’s power faded.
That autumn, the veteran chancellor had been forced to surrender the party leadership after suffering two poor election results.
Days after she announced she was giving up the post she had held for 18 years, Merz made the dramatic announcement that he would run to take her place.
Largely a forgotten figure, Merz had once been touted as a future chancellor. But he lost a power struggle with Merkel in the early noughties when, with the CDU in the opposition, Merkel was first elected party chairwoman and then took over the second most powerful function in the party - faction leader in the Bundestag.
The man she ousted to secure her power: Friedrich Merz.
The man from the hilly Sauerland region of western Germany left politics a few years later with his tail between his legs after he never even received a post in Merkel’s first cabinet. Instead, he made his millions on the boards of hedge funds and multinationals.
While his new life meant he could afford a (very small) private jet, Merz obviously still felt he had unfinished business. Merkel seemed invincible for years. But, in the wake of the refugee crisis, the CDU’s popularity went into a tail spin, leading to Merkel’s resignation of the party chairmanship after the party scored an historically poor result in the Hesse state election.
Merz spotted his chance and ran as the man who would drag the party back to its roots.
But Merkel had already made preparations for her departure. Earlier that year she had plucked a politician from the remote state of Saarland to serve as her party secretary and heir apparent: Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer was selected to run against Merz as the continuity candidate.
Throughout November, Merz and Kramp-Karrenbauer duelled in a series of hustings across the country. By the opening day of the conference, the race was still too close to call. Some delegates were itching for the pro-business, tough-on-immigration stance of Merz. Others saw the road to electoral success in Merkelism with a new face.
In Hamburg, both candidates had their last chance to impress the delegates. But, Merz, a towering figure at two-metres in height, appeared to get stage fright. Beads of sweat pearled on his forehead. The spotlight shone unforgivingly on his balding head. He was stiff… out of sorts.
Kramp-Karrenbauer, by contrast, used her composed speech to give an emotional “thank you” to Merkel for all the success she had brought to the party over the years.
Merkel’s protege won a knife-edge vote by 517 votes to 482.
It seemed at the time that Merz’ second career in politics had ended in the same way as the first one had… with Merkel giving him another bloody nose. Observers assumed that he would quietly retreat to his luxurious life as a consultant.
Fast forward five years and the CDU held another party conference this week.
Again, a vote was held on the person of the party chair. This time though, the winner was never in doubt: only one candidate was on the ballot.
CDU party chairman Friedrich Merz was given a convincing 90 percent of the vote.
This time around, his speech to delegates was calm and nerve-free. Not a bead of sweat dripped down his forehead. “He did that well,” acknowledged a headline in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, by no means a CDU-friendly newspaper.
Written off in 2018, Merz now has a firm grip over the right-wing party. How did it come to this?
For one, Merz showed a quality that most observers believed he was lacking: patience.
Hailed as a chancellor-in-waiting in 2018, Kramp-Karrenbauer proved to be a luckless chairwoman. After a series of election flops, which ended in the party voting with the AfD in Thuringia, she packed the job in after a little over a year.
Her successor, Armin Laschet, (who also defeated Merz for the leadership) fared no better. Laschet ran a half-hearted campaign to become chancellor in 2021 and managed to throw away a lead over Olaf Scholz by, among other things, being caught on camera cracking jokes during a visit to the site of a devastating flood.
After the CDU lost the 2021 election, Merz once again stood for party leader. Finally, the party decided to break with Merkel’s allies and put their trust in her rival.
That wasn’t the end of his troubles, though. In the intervening years, rumours of a Merkelist plot have never gone away.
Widely acknowledged as hot-tempered, Merz kept straying off script during his first year in charge. After New Year riots in an immigrant neighbourhood of Berlin, he railed against “little pashas” who lacked respect for authority. He later alleged that refugees come to Germany to get their teeth fixed, and accused some Ukrainians of being “welfare tourists”. Whatever the truth of these various claims, they infuriated the Merkalist faction, who didn’t want to scare away liberal voters.
Things came to a head last year when Hendrik Wüst, state leader in North Rhine Westphalia, published an op-ed in the country’s main conservative daily that urged the CDU to stick to “Merkel’s policies of modernity” and not “create chaos by scoring cheap populist points.”
Merz reportedly flew into a rage when he found out what Wüst had written.
Convinced that party rivals were conspiring against him, he reportedly told his inner circle that he was going to quit, saying “let him (Wüst) do the job… I’m sick of this, this is a disgrace.”
Eventually, CDU elder statesman Wolfgang Schäuble had to be called in to talk him back from the edge of the cliff, according to a profile of the CDU leader published by Der Spiegel last week.
Journalists who have watched Merz up close describe him as a man with a touch of paranoia and a very short fuse. He is apparently convinced that Merkel set him up for failure at the 2018 party conference by ordering the spotlight to be shone full beam on his forehead.
While questions around his temperament have never gone away, there has been a notable change of mood around the man who is most likely to run against Olaf Scholz at next year’s election.
What stuck out about the build up to this week’s party conference was how the whole narrative around Merz has changed over the past 12 months.
A year ago, some CDU watchers were wondering whether he would make it to the next election. Now, he has cemented his pace with a resounding 90 percent approval rate inside the party.
Critics like Wüst have largely been silenced. In the build up to the conference, they lined up to tell the media what a wonderful job Merz is doing.
Widely credited as responsible for this turnaround is Carsten Linnemann, the energetic young conservative that Merz installed as party secretary last summer.
Linnemann has been on team Merz since the outset. On the day after his defeat in Hamburg in 2018, the younger politician could be seen spinning a story to journalists on the sidelines about how disillusioned party members were quitting en masse.
Linnemann advocates “CDU pure” - i.e. a tack back to the right; he has drafted a new party programme - the fourth in its history - that seeks to emphasise the party’s conservative DNA; he also seems to have soothed his boss’ renowned temper - Merz hasn’t said anything particularly quotable in months.
The result: a much friendlier tone among the establishment media.
Public broadcaster ARD commented this week that the new CDU programme “is more conservative, incompatible with the Greens, and has Friedrich Merz’s signature… He has given the party a new direction and given it its pride back… why wouldn’t they choose him as their chancellor candidate?”
It’s been a long road, but Merz finally seems to have vanquished the ghosts of Angela Merkel and stamped his authority on the party she ruled for so long.
By the way, Merkel was asked to come to this year’s conference, but she turned down the invitation. Her office said that she had no interest in getting involved in current party debates.