Who is Friedrich Merz? The leader of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany who flirted with the extreme right

It is predicted that Friedrich Merz, leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) will become the next German chancellor.

It is projected that its party wins about 28% of the votes. The question now is who could form a coalition.

Described by his followers as an antidote for the crisis of confidence in Europe, Merz, 69, is a familiar face for the old guard of his party.

Politically, it has never seemed so stimulating. And yet, it promises to provide Germany with a stronger leadership and address many of your country’s problems in four years.

His explosive offer last month to harden the migration rules with the support of the extreme right votes in Parliament revealed a man willing to bet on breaking an important taboo.

He also scored another clear rest of the most centrist position of CDU under his former rival of the Angela Merkel match.

Although Merz finally did not change the law, he had launched a ray to an electoral campaign triggered by the Collapse of the Government of Foreign Minister Olaf Scholz At the end of last year.

Famous marginalized by Merkel before she became a chancellor, left the Parliament completely to find a lucrative series of corporate jobs and was discarded as yesterday’s man.

But now it seems ready to ensure the work that has covered for so long.

On January 23, a month before the Federal Elections of Germany, people gathered in one of Berlin’s five -star hotels to listen to Merz to give a foreign policy speech.

The buzz around the “dance hall” at the hotel in Rome is not exactly electric, but is far from 20 years ago, when his political career looked.

Merz is also a licensed pilot, who caused criticism in 2022 for flying to Sylt Island in northern Germany on his private plane for the wedding of political partner Christian Lindner.

While taking the stage at the Hotel de Rome, there is a courteous applause for the conservative opposition of the CDU of Germany, which constantly get ahead of surveys.

Tall, thin, with a suit and glasses, Merz cuts a quiet, conventional and commercial figure while trying to project a preparation for power.

But it has been a winding trip to this point.

Merz was born in the city of Brillon of West Germany in 1955 in a prominent conservative and Catholic family.

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

The young Merz joined the CDU while he was still at school.

In an interview 25 years ago with the German newspaper Tagespiegel, he claimed a wilder youth than his CV without suggesting.

Among his misadventures, he described running the streets on a motorcycle, hanging out with friends for a chips and playing the card game Double head On the back of the class.

A teenage party to which he made reference ended with a group of students who took a collective urinating in the school aquarium, according to Der Spiegel magazine.

There is some skepticism that the teenager Merz was a great fall. A former classmate recalled that the disruptive behavior of young Friedrich was more often equivalent to simply wanting “the last word.”

Whether inside or outside the record, the people who know it have told me that you enjoy a beer and that they can be fun, although few could offer an anecdote to illustrate this.

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

The couple has three children.

For a few years, Merz worked as a lawyer, but always had the view of the policy and was chosen for the European Parliament in 1989, at 33.

“We were both quite young and very fresh and say diapers,” says Dagmar Roth-Behrendt, who became an eurys at the same time for the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD).

He found the young Merz as serious, reliable, honest and polite.

Even humoric, a quality she feels is less obvious now: “I suppose that the amount of bruises over time could have hardened it a bit.”

But did he find at the beginning of his career as a possible chancellor?

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

However, everyone knew that it was deeply ambitious and Merz soon changed the EU politics to the National Parliament of Germany, the Bundestag, in 1994.

He rose through the ranks, promoted as talent in the most right traditionalist faction of the party.

“He is a splendid speaker and a deep thinker,” says Klaus-Peter Willsch, a member of the Bundestag CDU who knows him for more than 30 years.

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

Its first two failures, in 2018 and January 2021, could also be read as a sign of their struggle to court the bases.

But it was in the early nineties, when his ambitions initially deranged, which he lost to Angela Merkel in a struggle of power of the party.

Merkel, the discrete quantum chemist of the old communist, and Merz, the openly safe lawyer of the West, never looked face to face.

Merz is going through this bitter episode in a brief autobiographical publication on the CDU website, saying that by 2009 he had decided to leave Parliament to “leave space for reflection.”

His years of reflection involved forging a career in financial and corporate laws, becoming executive of the Board Room in several international companies and, as supposedly, a millionaire.

It would be more than a decade before he returned to Parliament, where since then he has tried to destroy Merkel’s most centrist doctrine in CDU’s conservatism.

A marked moment of political compensation occurred at the end of January, when Friedrich Merz exceeded a non -binding motion on stricted immigration rules, trusting the votes of the extreme right -wing alternative Für Deutschland (AFD).

He insisted that there had not been a direct collaboration with the AFD, but his movement led to mass protests and was not sentenced twice by Merkel herself.

These were rare public interventions of women who ruled Germany for 16 years.

The detractors said it was an unforgivable electoral gambit, but the supporters insisted that Merz was, in fact, trying to attract people skillfully from the extreme right.

He risked more moderate parts of the electorate before, voting in the 1990s against a bill that included the criminalization of marital violation.

He later explained that he considered that marriage violation was already a crime, and were other problems in the bill to which he opposed.

The surveys suggest that it is not especially popular among young people and women, but Klaus -peter Willsch believes that the painted image of the German media is unfair.

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

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

She says that her marriage has been mutual support: “We both take care of the work of the other and divide the care of children in such a way that it was compatible with our professional obligations.”

Whatever the criticisms, an EU diplomat told me that Brussels was “anxiously waiting for her arrival.”

“It’s time to move from this German dead point and make that engine work.”