German conservative Friedrich Merz to run for chancellor

"We're back on track," said Friedrich Merz, the leader of Germany's center-right Christian Democrats (CDU) on Tuesday, after it became clear that he would be the next chancellor candidate for the center-right alliance of the CDU and its Bavarian counterpart, the Christian Socialist Union (CSU).

Merz announced his candidacy alongside CSU head Markus Söder, who had increasingly been posturing as Merz's political opponent. But at the announcement on Tuesday, Söder stressed that he fully supported Merz, and that they were united by a common goal to win the next election.

Next week, the chairs of both sister parties, known together as the Union, will give their formal approval. That will officially make Merz the alliance's lead candidate for the upcoming federal election, set for September 2025 — putting him on track to potentially challenge the incumbent, Chancellor Olaf Scholz. The chancellor has said he would like to run again, but his candidacy hasn't been confirmed by his center-left party.

During Tuesday's announcement, Merz highlighted topics he found particularly important: migration, which he said was "still a big issue," and the economy, which he aims to realign with the social market principles which have historically shaped Germany's economic and social policies since reunification in 1990.

Merz argued that Germany's current economic standing was "precarious," and said it was time for "politics that would see Germany get ahead once again."

Merz's party platform focuses on migration, economy

At 68, Merz is the oldest lead candidate for the office of chancellor that Germany has seen in over 50 years. The liberal economist began his journey toward the chancellory in 2022, when he took over the reins of the CDU. It was his third attempt at becoming the party head, after a long career in private enterprise.

Some of the promises he made back then now seem very distant. He had, for example, assured voters he could cut the support for the far-right AfD in half. Two years later, the conservative Union has all but failed in that regard. In a recent election in the eastern state of Thuringia, the CDU trailed behind the AfD by nearly 10 percentage points.

Merz has reshaped his party's basic program, and was shrewd enough to do so while the CDU was leading the opposition. In many points, and even in its basic tenor, the new CDU platform, titled "Living in Freedom, Leading Germany Safely Into the Future," has taken a step back from the guidance of Merz's party predecessor, former Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Merz's approach is markedly more conservative, and even resumes the controversial notion of a German Leitkultur, or leading culture, a term dating back to the 1990s that many see as a call for assimilation.

He has also departed from the party's more liberal stance toward Islam, adopting instead a somewhat bellicose language: "An Islam that does not share our values and rejects our liberal society does not belong in Germany."

In terms of migration and asylum policies, Merz has led the CDU to seek tighter regulations and to reinstate military conscription, which was scrapped in 2011. Merz has said this new program demonstrates "who we are, where we stand and what we want."

Political life shaped by rivalry with Merkel

Merz and Merkel go back a long way, their relationship marked by disappointment, anger and dislike.

In many ways, they represent two different political streams within the CDU. Merz, a business lawyer from western Germany's rural Sauerland, is much more conservative than Merkel, who holds a doctorate in quantum chemistry and hails from eastern Germany.

When Merz turned his back on party leadership, after Merkel took charge of the CDU, and left politics altogether in 2009, he went into business. In 2016, he became the supervisory board chairman in the German office of the world's largest asset management corporation, BlackRock.

He rarely commented on Merkel's leadership. When he did, it was barbed with criticism, once calling Merkel's government "godawful."

After Merkel retired in 2021 he made his way back into politics, striving for party leadership and losing first to Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, seen by many as Merkel's protege, and then Armin Laschet, who was the CDU's lead candidate for the 2021 federal election.

When Laschet lost the bid and the chancellorship rotated to the CDU's historical rival, the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), the way was finally clear for Merz to become the party's 10th leader since its founding in 1948.

It's worth noting that Merz is widely considered to be more trans-Atlantic than European — he speaks fluent English and has spent lots of time in the United States, where economically, he seems better connected that most active German politicians.

As the head of the CDU, Merz has been shaping the future of the entire Union. And as party group leader in the Bundestag, he's slowly but surely becoming the political opponent of Scholz's middle-class, middle-of-the-road approach. Their verbal sparring matches in parliament have become increasingly unforgiving, and their differences have become especially pronounced on the issues of migration and asylum policies.

Those differences are becoming noticeably more public as the next federal election draws nearer. This is all the more pointed, given the surge in the polls that right- and left-wing parties have experienced of late, and the sharp turn that migration politics have taken in Germany.

This article was originally written in German.