(Bloomberg) -- Friedrich Merz has waited 25 years to become German chancellor and his best chance is now just months away.
The head of Germany’s Christian Democratic Union is the clear front-runner to lead Europe’s largest economy after Olaf Scholz pulled the plug on his coalition and called for early elections. The center-right party is well-ahead in the polls, with almost double the support of Scholz’s Social Democrats.
Merz senses his opportunity, pushing Scholz to accelerate snap elections by holding a confidence vote next week in the Bundestag, Germany’s lower house of parliament. The embattled chancellor has said he wants to wait until Jan. 15, arguing that his government still needs to approve a number of important laws before then.
“It is important that we now very quickly put responsibility for the composition of the German Bundestag back into the hands of the voters,” Merz told reporters in Berlin on Thursday after a meeting of his parliamentary caucus.
Merz is an old-school German conservative. He’s close to the business elite of the former West and he’s built his career around opposition to public borrowing and immigration, positions that brought him into conflict with Angela Merkel when she ran the CDU.
To pave the way for elections as early as January, Merz pressed his case with Scholz at a closed-door meeting in Berlin on Thursday, but Scholz rejected Merz’s appeal, which could delay the snap vote until March.
Merz’s urgency is about both ambition and anxiety. The 68-year-old is notorious for having a short temper as well as antagonizing voters with divisive comments.
His gruff demeanor has him in fourth place in a ranking of the country’s most popular politicians, trailing two conservative colleagues, but ahead of Scholz and the Greens’ Robert Habeck. That means the longer a campaign takes, the more time voters have to rethink their support.
Out of frustration with Merkel’s moderate policies — and after she ousted him as caucus leader in 2002 — Merz left politics to join a prominent law firm and later chaired the supervisory board of BlackRock Inc.’s German asset management unit.
After the CDU’s loss to Scholz’s Social Democrats in 2021, he took charge of the party and dragged it to the right. As head of the opposition, he has incessantly attacked Scholz’s government over loose migration policy and Germany’s slow growth.
If Merz manages to win the chancellery, his biggest task would be to revive Germany’s sputtering economy, with the auto industry in decline, a trade war looming with the US and the war in Ukraine still raging. His approach would be classic conservatism with low taxes, less regulation and lower social spending. Here are his positions on major issues:
Economy
With close ties to the financial sector, Merz advocates for corporate deregulation and lower taxes. To create room for more public investment, he would likely seek to prune welfare and pension benefits, which would risk stoking social tensions.
Recently, he caused an uproar when he demanded more “respect” for people who enjoy their wealth, which isn’t the majority of Germans. Merz himself is a hobby pilot and regularly flies to events on his private plane.
A Merz-led government is expected to agree on a reform package “that will strengthen supply and demand, with more room for public investment,” said Holger Schmieding, chief economist at Berenberg. He’s ruled out raising taxes and plans to stick to the country’s strict debt limit.
Trump
Scholz never made a secret of his rapport with US President Joe Biden, and that would have made for tense relations with Donald Trump upon his return to the White House. As a fellow conservative with business experience, Merz would likely get along better with the Republican, who frequently expressed his frustration with Germany’s levels of NATO spending during his first term.
“Merz would be able to talk to President Trump on the same eye-level,” CDU lawmaker Johann Wadephul told reporters on Wednesday. Both also share deep distrust of China. Merz has repeatedly warned that China poses a risk to German security and has criticized Scholz for being too soft on Beijing.
Migration
Merz has long called for a more restrictive stance on migration, bristling under Merkel’s open-door policy during the Syrian refugee crisis. He would almost certainly clamp down on illegal migration and make Germany less open to refugees.
He’s regularly taken a populist tone on the topic. His controversial remarks have included calling war refugees from Ukraine “social welfare tourists” and making derogatory statements about the children of Arabic migrants. He’s also claimed without evidence that regular Germans couldn’t get dental appointments because migrants were coming to get their teeth fixed.
EU
While Merz started his political career as member of the EU parliament and has kept close with officials in Brussels, he’s unlikely to push for much deeper integration and is opposed to the idea of any kind of joint debt.
His relation with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen — a fellow member of the CDU — is strained though, because she used to be a close ally of Merkel.
Ukraine
Merz could be a welcome ally for Kyiv. In contrast to Scholz, he has called for supplying Ukraine with long-range Taurus missiles.
The CDU leader also wants to increase Germany’s defense spending from €52 billion to around €80 billion, although he hasn’t said where the money would come from.
--With assistance from Jana Randow.
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