Who is Friedrich Merz? Germany’s front-runner who flirted with far right

He is the man tipped to be Germany’s next leader: an antidote to Europe’s crisis of confidence, say his supporters.

Friedrich Merz is a familiar face of his conservative party’s old guard. Politically, he has never come across as exhilarating.

And yet his explosive bid to tighten migration rules with the support of far-right votes in parliament reveals a man willing to gamble by breaking a major taboo.

It also marks yet another clear break from his Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party’s more centrist stance under his former party rival Angela Merkel.

Although Merz ultimately failed to change the law, he had launched a lightning bolt into an election campaign triggered by the collapse of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government late last year.

Famously sidelined by Merkel before she became chancellor, he quit parliament entirely to pursue a lucrative series of corporate jobs and was written off as yesterday’s man.

But there is a sense of inevitability that this 69-year-old comeback kid might be on the cusp of clinching the job he has coveted for so long.

It is 23 January, one month until Germany’s snap federal election, and people have gathered in one of Berlin’s five-star hotels to hear Merz give a foreign policy speech.

The buzz around the “ballroom” in the Hotel de Rome isn’t exactly electric – but it is a far cry from 20 years ago, when his political career looked over.

Merz is also a licensed pilot, who drew criticism in 2022 for flying to the north German island of Sylt in his private plane for the wedding of fellow politician Christian Lindner.

As he takes to the stage in the Hotel de Rome, there’s polite applause for the leader of Germany’s conservative CDU opposition, who are consistently ahead in the polls.

Tall, slim, in a suit and glasses, Merz cuts a calm, conventional, business-like figure as he tries to project a readiness for power.

But it has been a winding journey to get to this point.

Merz was born in the west German town of Brilon in 1955 into a prominent conservative, Catholic family.

His father served as a local judge, as does Friedrich Merz’s wife Charlotte to this day.

The younger Merz joined the CDU while still at school.

In an interview 25 years ago with the German newspaper Tagesspiegel he laid claim to a wilder youth than his strait-laced CV might suggest.

Among his misadventures, he described racing through the streets on a motorcycle, hanging out with friends by a chip stand and playing the card game Doppelkopf in the back of the class.

A teenage party he referenced ended up with a group of students taking a collective pee in the school aquarium, according to Der Spiegel magazine.

There is some scepticism that the teenage Merz was much of a rabble-rouser. A former classmate recalled that the young Friedrich’s disruptive behaviour more often amounted to simply wanting “the last word”.

Whether on or off the record, people who have known him have told me he enjoys a beer and can indeed be fun, though few were able to offer an anecdote to illustrate this.

After school, he went on to military service before studying law and marrying fellow student Charlotte Gass in 1981.

The couple have three children.

For a few years, Merz worked as a lawyer but he always had his eye on politics and was elected to the European Parliament in 1989, aged 33.

“We were both quite young and very fresh and let’s say unspoilt,” says Dagmar Roth-Behrendt, who became an MEP at the same time for the centre-left Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD).

She found the young Merz to be serious, reliable, honest and polite.

Even humorous – a quality that she feels is less obvious now: “I assume the amount of bruises over time might have hardened him a bit.”

But did he come across early in his career as a potential chancellor?

“I would have probably have said no, no way. Come on, you must be kidding!”

Yet everyone knew him to be deeply ambitious and Merz soon made the switch from EU politics to Germany’s national parliament, the Bundestag, in 1994.

He rose through the ranks, touted as a talent on the party’s more right-wing, traditionalist faction.

“He’s a splendid speaker and a profound thinker,” says Klaus-Peter Willsch, a CDU member of the Bundestag who has known him for more than 30 years.

“A fighter,” says Willsch, evidenced by the fact that Merz made three attempts to lead his party.

His first two failures, in 2018 and January 2021, could also be read as a sign of his struggle to woo the grassroots.

But it was back in the early noughties, when his ambitions were initially derailed, that he lost out to Angela Merkel in a party power struggle.

Merkel, the understated quantum chemist from the former communist east, and Merz, the overtly-assured lawyer from the west, never much saw eye-to-eye.

Merz glosses over this bitter episode in a brief autobiographical post on the CDU website, saying that by 2009 he had decided to leave parliament to “make room for reflection”.

His years of reflection involved forging a career in finance and corporate law – becoming a boardroom executive at various international firms and, reputedly, a millionaire.

It would be more than a decade before he returned to parliament, where he has since sought to rip up Merkel’s more centrist doctrine on CDU conservatism.

A marked moment of political severance came at the end of last month, when Friedrich Merz pushed through a non-binding motion on tougher immigration rules, by relying on votes from the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).

He insisted there had been no direct collaboration with the AfD, but his move led to mass protests and has twice been condemned by none other than Merkel herself.

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

Detractors say it was an unforgivable election gambit that will only benefit the AfD, but supporters insist Merz is, in fact, seeking to lure people cleverly from the far right.

He has risked alienating more moderate parts of the electorate before, voting in the 1990s against a bill that included the criminalisation of marital rape.

He later explained that he considered marital rape to already be a crime, and it was other issues in the bill that he objected to.

Polls suggest he is not especially popular among young people and women – but Klaus-Peter Willsch believes the picture painted of him in German media is unfair.

“I had him several times in my constituency,” he tells me. “Afterwards, women come up and say he’s a nice guy.”

Charlotte Merz has likewise come to his defence, telling the Westfalenpost: “What some people write about my husband’s image of women is simply not true.”

She says their marriage has been one of mutual support: “We both took care of each other’s jobs and divided the childcare in such a way that it was compatible with our professional obligations.”

His popularity will be put to the test as the election approaches, and also as speculation focuses less on whether they will win and more on who they might form a coalition with.

Some observers fear trust among potential coalition partners has been damaged by Merz’s experimental approach to tacit collaboration with the AfD – a party he insists he will never govern with.

Whatever the critiques, one EU diplomat told me Brussels was “anxiously awaiting his arrival”.

“It’s time to move on from this German deadlock and get that motor running.”