Friedrich Merz

Based on Wikipedia: Friedrich Merz

It took Friedrich Merz three tries to become leader of Germany's largest conservative party. And when he finally won the chancellorship in May 2025, he needed two rounds of voting in parliament to secure it—a first in German history. Persistence, it seems, is the defining quality of Germany's new leader.

But this is not simply a story of a man who refused to give up. It's the story of a politician who spent fifteen years in the wilderness after losing a brutal power struggle with Angela Merkel, built a fortune as a corporate lawyer, and then returned to vanquish his rival's successors and reshape German politics in the process.

A Conservative's Conservative

Merz was born on November 11, 1955, in Brilon, a small town in the North Rhine-Westphalia region of what was then West Germany. His family was deeply embedded in local conservative politics. His father was a judge and a member of the Christian Democratic Union, known as the CDU—the center-right party that has dominated German politics since World War Two, producing chancellors from Konrad Adenauer to Helmut Kohl to Angela Merkel.

The Sauvigny family, his mother's side, were local patricians of French ancestry. His maternal grandfather, Josef Paul Sauvigny, had been mayor of Brilon. This lineage would later cause Merz considerable embarrassment when it emerged that his grandfather had remained mayor after the Nazis seized power in 1933, praised what he called the Nazi "national revolution," and renamed streets in the town after Adolf Hitler and Hermann Göring. Sauvigny formally joined the Nazi Party in 1937.

Tragedy marked Merz's family life. Of his three siblings, two died relatively young—his sister at twenty-one in a car accident, his brother before age fifty from multiple sclerosis.

Merz's education followed an unconventional path. He was expelled from his first secondary school for disciplinary reasons and had to finish his Abitur—the German equivalent of high school graduation exams—at a different institution. After military service with an artillery unit, he studied law on a scholarship from the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, a think tank affiliated with the CDU.

At university in Bonn, he joined a Catholic student fraternity called KDStV Bavaria Bonn, part of a network of traditional fraternities founded in 1844. These fraternities, while less infamous than the dueling fraternities that scarred members' faces, still represent a deeply traditional, hierarchical strand of German society.

The Rise

Merz joined the CDU's youth wing at seventeen, in 1972. This was the height of the Cold War, and anti-communism was not merely a political preference in West Germany—it was the founding ideology of the state itself. The country existed precisely because it rejected the communist system imposed on East Germany by the Soviet Union.

His early career moved quickly. After a brief stint as a judge and then as an in-house lawyer for the German chemical industry, he won a seat in the European Parliament in 1989. This was the year the Berlin Wall fell, transforming European politics overnight.

In 1994, Merz moved to the Bundestag, the German federal parliament, representing his home region of Hochsauerland. He established himself as the CDU's leading expert on financial policy—taxation, banking, markets. By 2000, at age forty-four, he had risen to become chairman of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group.

A word of explanation is needed here. German politics has a peculiarity: the CDU does not operate in Bavaria, Germany's largest and most conservative state. Instead, Bavaria has its own party, the Christian Social Union, or CSU, which is even more conservative than the CDU. The two parties never compete against each other and always form a joint parliamentary group in the Bundestag, known as the Union. They are, in effect, one party that pretends to be two.

As leader of this joint parliamentary group, Merz was the opposition leader during Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's first term. He was, by most accounts, the second most powerful figure in the CDU.

The most powerful figure was a physicist from East Germany named Angela Merkel.

The Rivalry

Merkel and Merz both rose to prominence in 2000—she as chairwoman of the CDU, he as leader of its parliamentary group. On paper, they were partners leading the opposition together. In reality, they were rivals for control of the party's future.

Their conflict represented a deeper tension within the CDU. Merz embodied the party's traditional wing: pro-business, fiscally conservative, skeptical of the welfare state, Catholic, male, West German. He once wrote a book titled "Mehr Kapitalismus wagen," which translates to "Venturing More Capitalism"—a deliberate echo of Willy Brandt's famous phrase "Mehr Demokratie wagen" (Venturing More Democracy).

Merkel represented something new. She was Protestant, female, East German, and ideologically harder to pin down. She would later be accused by conservatives of moving the party to the center, abandoning nuclear power, opening Germany's borders to refugees, and generally betraying CDU principles.

After the 2002 federal election, Merkel made her move. She claimed the parliamentary group chairmanship for herself, demoting Merz to deputy. He struggled on for two more years before resigning in December 2004, effectively conceding defeat.

By 2007, he announced he would not run for office again. In 2009, he left parliament entirely.

Merkel would go on to serve as Chancellor of Germany for sixteen years, from 2005 to 2021, becoming one of the most powerful leaders in the world. Merz, meanwhile, became a corporate lawyer.

The Wilderness Years

When politicians leave office, they often join law firms or corporate boards. Merz did this with unusual success.

He became a senior counsel at Mayer Brown, a major international law firm, working on mergers and acquisitions, banking, and corporate finance out of their Düsseldorf office. He joined the boards of numerous companies. Most controversially, he became chairman of the German arm of BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager.

His wealth grew substantially. He is now described as a "reputed multimillionaire," though the exact figures are unclear. What is clear is that he charged substantial fees. When the German government hired him in 2010 to help sell WestLB, a state-controlled bank, he billed five thousand euros per day—including Saturdays and Sundays. Over the course of the assignment, which ultimately failed to find a buyer, he collected nearly two million euros from taxpayers.

Merz also pursued expensive hobbies. He became a licensed private pilot and acquired two airplanes. This lifestyle would later be used against him politically, as critics portrayed him as out of touch with ordinary Germans.

He was not entirely absent from politics during these years. In 2005, German media reported that he had joined the "Andean Pact," an originally secret network of influential CDU men formed in 1979 during a trip to South America. The group reportedly opposed Merkel's leadership. But opposition was one thing; mounting a credible challenge was another.

The Return

In 2018, Angela Merkel announced she would step down as CDU leader. Merz saw his chance.

His candidacy was promoted by Wolfgang Schäuble, the former CDU chairman and longtime Bundestag president who had been Merkel's predecessor as party leader back in 2000. The conservative establishment was rallying behind their man.

But Merz lost. In the second round of voting at the party congress, he was defeated by Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, a centrist seen as Merkel's preferred successor.

Two years later, Kramp-Karrenbauer resigned after a political crisis. Merz ran again in January 2021. And lost again—this time to Armin Laschet, the minister-president of North Rhine-Westphalia.

Two defeats would end most political careers. Merz pressed on.

In a remarkable display of either humility or desperation, he offered to join the government as economy minister immediately after losing the leadership vote. The ministry was already held by a fellow CDU member; the offer was rebuffed. Laschet, trying to unify the party, recruited Merz to his campaign team instead.

Then Laschet lost the 2021 federal election to the Social Democrats. The CDU found itself in opposition for the first time in sixteen years. Laschet's authority was shattered.

In December 2021, Merz ran a third time. This time, all 400,000 CDU members could vote directly, rather than just party congress delegates. He won with 62.1 percent in the first round. Asked for his reaction, he said: "Quietly I just said to myself, 'WOW'; but only quietly—the winning marching songs are far from me."

In January 2022, congress delegates formally confirmed him as party leader. Of 983 delegates, 915 voted for him—94.6 percent. After eighteen years in the political wilderness, Friedrich Merz had finally won.

The Road to the Chancellery

Being CDU leader did not automatically make Merz the party's candidate for chancellor. In Germany's federal system, state minister-presidents often rival the national party leader for this position. In 2021, Laschet had defeated the Bavarian CSU leader Markus Söder for the chancellor candidacy despite Söder's higher poll numbers.

For 2025, Merz faced potential competition from Hendrik Wüst, the CDU minister-president of North Rhine-Westphalia, and from Söder again. But both eventually declined to run and endorsed Merz.

Events then moved faster than anyone expected. In November 2024, the governing coalition—a three-way alliance between the Social Democrats, Greens, and Free Democrats—collapsed in acrimony. New elections were called seven months ahead of schedule.

The February 2025 election gave the CDU/CSU a plurality of seats, though it was their second-worst result ever. Still, as leader of the largest party, Merz was positioned to become chancellor.

Coalition negotiations with the Social Democrats—led by Lars Klingbeil—produced what Germans call a Große Koalition, or grand coalition, though technically the term applies to coalitions of the two largest parties, and the SPD was no longer second-largest.

On May 6, 2025, the Bundestag voted Merz chancellor. It took two rounds—unprecedented in German history. But after half a century in politics, Friedrich Merz had reached the top.

Chancellor Merz

Merz's early chancellorship has been defined by three issues: fiscal policy, immigration, and European security.

On fiscal policy, he proposed something dramatic. Germany's constitution includes a provision called the Schuldenbremse—the "debt brake"—which strictly limits government borrowing. It was introduced in 2009, partly in response to the global financial crisis, and has become almost sacred to German conservatives.

Merz proposed amending this constitutional provision to exempt defense spending above one percent of gross domestic product. He also negotiated a special fund of five hundred billion euros for infrastructure and climate investments over ten years. On March 18, 2025, parliament approved these constitutional changes.

The move was controversial. Economists warned it could trigger inflation and dramatically increase Germany's debt burden. By 2035, the government could be paying approximately seventy-one billion euros annually in interest alone. For a politician who once wrote a book called "Venturing More Capitalism," embracing massive government borrowing represents a notable evolution.

On immigration, Merz has emphasized border security—a position consistent with his longtime stance on the issue. An early challenge has been the question of how to handle the Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD, Germany's far-right party. German authorities have designated the AfD as extremist, raising questions about what restrictions should apply to it.

In foreign policy, Merz has positioned himself as a staunch supporter of the European Union, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and what foreign policy analysts call the "liberal international order"—the system of international institutions, free trade, and democratic alliances built after World War Two.

He once described himself as "truly European, a convinced Transatlanticist, and a German open to the world." He has called for a closer European union and even "an army for Europe"—a long-discussed but never-realized proposal for unified European military forces.

Before Donald Trump's second presidency, Merz was frequently described as "exceptionally pro-American." He once chaired the Atlantik-Brücke, an organization founded in 1952 to promote German-American friendship. The name means "Atlantic Bridge."

How these positions will evolve as America's role in Europe changes remains to be seen.

The Man

Friedrich Merz is now sixty-nine years old. He is Catholic, married, and a father. He owns two airplanes and flies them himself. He reportedly made millions as a corporate lawyer and BlackRock executive.

His political identity is that of a traditional German conservative—pro-business, fiscally disciplined, socially conventional. He represents the wing of the CDU that felt marginalized during the Merkel years, when the party moved toward the center on issues from nuclear energy to immigration to same-sex marriage.

Whether Merz will move the CDU back to the right, or whether the pressures of governing a coalition with the Social Democrats will force continued pragmatism, is the central question of his chancellorship.

What is clear is that he got there the hard way. Expelled from one school, defeated in two leadership elections, exiled from politics for fifteen years, and requiring two votes in parliament to finally claim the chancellorship. Angela Merkel, his longtime rival, governed Germany for sixteen years with apparent ease. Merz has had to fight for every step.

Perhaps that says something about the nature of political success. Perhaps it says something about the particular moment in German politics—a country grappling with the end of the Merkel era, the rise of the far right, the changing role of America in Europe, and the return of war to the continent.

Or perhaps Friedrich Merz is simply a man who doesn't know how to quit.