For years, Friedrich Merz battled pervasive doubts about his fitness to lead Germany’s main opposition party.
That changed earlier this week when 1,001 Christian Democrats gathered in Berlin to acclaim the man they now believe will lead them to electoral victory in 2025 and become Germany’s next chancellor.
The CDU is the most popular party in the country, enjoying nearly twice the level of support of Olaf Scholz’s ruling Social Democrats. And Merz, who was re-elected chair with 90 per cent of the vote and pushed through a new programme that recasts the CDU in his own — conservative — image, is its undisputed leader.
There are, however, plenty of clouds on the horizon. Merz may be popular in his own party, but he isn’t in the country at large. His polling numbers have been consistently lower than those of the CDU.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Merz said that this did not matter. “The real news is that the opposition leader’s approval ratings are way ahead of those of the incumbent chancellor,” he said, in a swipe at Scholz. “That was only ever the case in Germany after a party had been in power for ages.” Scholz’s Social Democrat-led coalition has ruled Germany for less than two-and-a-half years.
A millionaire former BlackRock executive who returned to the political fray in 2018 after a 16-year career in business, Merz blamed the Germans’ negative view of him on “years of Merz-bashing that has targeted me personally”.
“There is this completely distorted image of me that was nurtured not only by my political opponents but also by people in my own party, before I was elected chair,” said Merz.
Public perceptions cannot be changed in just two-and-a-half years, he said. “But we’re on the right track now, and it’s getting better.”
Things are certainly looking up for the CDU. The party has recovered from its 2021 election defeat, when it scored the worst result in its history. It governs some of Germany’s biggest and most populous states, and last year regained control of the German capital Berlin after 22 years of SPD rule.
It has also made peace with its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, and its leader Markus Söder, chief protagonist of a CDU-CSU power struggle in 2021 that some say cost them the election.
The CDU’s image has also been aided by a change in Merz’s rhetoric. The 68-year-old was long seen as impulsive, irascible and thin-skinned — the temperamental opposite of his longtime CDU rival Angela Merkel, Germany’s famously unflappable ex-chancellor.
He was frequently accused of populism and of flirting with the kind of tropes more often associated with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which until recently was surging in the polls.
He once accused Ukrainian refugees of “welfare tourism” — a comment he later apologised for — and last year described the sons of immigrants as “little pashas”. He also suggested failed asylum seekers were getting expensive dental treatment done at the taxpayers’ expense while ordinary Germans struggled to get an appointment with a dentist.
Merz told the FT that as opposition leader, “you should be allowed to . . . push the envelope a bit”. His comment on dentists had put the issue of welfare benefits for asylum seekers on the political agenda “and forced the government to act”, he said.
But he said the days of such comments were over as he pivoted to a more statesmanlike approach. “The closer we get to the Bundestag election [in autumn 2025], the less voters see me as the leader of the opposition and the more they rate me as a potential chancellor,” he said. “And so there will be fewer interventions of the kind you’ve seen in the past.”
His political opponents doubt he has really changed. “Merz has a very short fuse, and is very vain,” said an official close to Scholz. “He’s easily offended and attacks others in the party who dare to criticise him.”
But Merz, who was only elected CDU leader on the third attempt, in 2022, has tried hard to sand down his sharper edges — to the relief of party comrades. That was clear in his speech at the CDU conference on May 6, seen as a rather pedestrian affair that failed to scale the rhetorical heights but triggered no negative headlines.
“At least there were no gaffes, which is a big deal where Merz is concerned,” said one CDU MP.
But many potential obstacles remain on his path to power. Much hinges on state parliament elections in Saxony, Brandenburg and Thuringia this September, where the CDU is seeking to stop the AfD’s advance: polls suggest the far-right party could win in all three eastern German states.
Shortly after those elections, the CDU and CSU will decide on a joint candidate for chancellor in 2025. Merz is currently odds-on favourite.
But a disastrous showing in the east could provide an opening for two of his rivals — Söder and Hendrik Wüst, prime minister of North Rhine-Westphalia. Both men’s approval ratings are much higher than Merz’s.
Merz sees a repetition of 2021, when Söder vied to become the CDU/CSU candidate for chancellor, throwing the alliance into chaos, as unlikely. “The CDU and CSU will see it as their political responsibility to win the election,” he said. “And we’ll only win if we’re united.”
Questions remain, however. Experts say the CDU’s poll numbers should actually be much higher than 30 per cent given how unpopular Scholz’s coalition is, and blame that on Merz’s lack of appeal to female and younger voters. Meanwhile, they argue, centrist voters have been put off by the party’s shift to the right.
One is Eckart Bauer, a CDU member from Berlin, who listened to a speech by Merz in the capital last month. He noted how Merz praised past Christian Democrat chancellors such as Helmut Kohl but never mentioned Merkel, who he lost to in a power struggle in 2002.
“They want to write her out of history,” he said, “But you’re not doing the party a favour by ignoring her contribution.”
Bauer said that under Merkel the CDU was a “big tent party” that appealed to people across the political spectrum. There was a risk that under Merz that would change, he said.
The former businessman has certainly moved the party in a conservative direction. The new programme adopted at last week’s conference endorses a return to nuclear power, an asylum system mirroring the UK’s policy of sending migrants to Rwanda and moves towards restoring military conscription.
Some in the party are worried that the people who voted CDU between 2005 and 2017 because they liked Merkel might choose other parties next time. Merz is not. “I don’t think there were actually that many,” he said. “A lot of people praised Angela Merkel who never voted CDU in their lives.”
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