Who is Friedrich Merz? German leader Christian Democratic Union who flirted the end of his right law star-news.press/wp

With outbound surveys in, Friedrich Merz – leader of Christian Democratic Union (CDU) – it was appointed to become the following next chancellor.

His party is planned to win about 29% of the votes. The question is now who could form a coalition.

His supporters described as an antidote for the crisis of the confidence in Europe, Merz, 69, the old party is known.

Politically, he never came across exciting. And yet he promises that Germany will provide stronger leadership and fight in many problems of his country within four years.

His explosive bid last month of the tensed rules of migration with the support of the ultimate rights in the parliament discovered a man who was willing to gamble by breaking the main tab.

He also marked another clear break from CDU more centrist stood under his former rival Angela Merkel.

Although Merz ultimately failed to change the law, he launched a lightning bolt in the electoral campaign initiated by Government collapse Chancellor Olaf Scholza late last year.

He knew Merkel, before she became the Chancellor, he completely left the parliament to continue the lucrative series of corporate jobs and was written as yesterday.

But he now seems to cross for a job that has longed for so long.

On 23. January, a month before the German ally gathered in one of the five-star hotels in Berlin who heard Merz give external speech about foreign policy.

Buzz around “Ballroom” at the Hotel de Rome is not exactly electric – but it is far a cry of 20 years ago, when his political career looked.

Merz is also a licensed pilot, who pulled out a critique 2022. for flying northern German Island Sylt in his private plane for wedding colleagues politician Christian Lindner.

As he goes to the stage at the De Rome Hotel, there is a decent applause for the leader of the German conservative CDU opposition, which are consistently in front of the survey.

High, thin, in suit and glasses, Merz cut calmly, conventionally, business-like figure while trying to project the readiness for power.

But it was a wound trip to get to this point.

Merz was born in the Western German city of Brilon in 1955. in a prominent conservative, Catholic family.

His father served as a local judge, as well as his wife Friedrich Merz Charlotte until today.

Junior Merz joined the CDU while he was still at school.

In an interview, 25 years ago with the German newspaper Taxespiegel passed the claim for the Mlado Dilder than his resume could suggest.

Among his accidents he described races through the streets on a motorcycle, hanging out with friends with a boom chip and playing card Double head in the back of the class.

The teenage party he led ended with a group of students who took collective pees in the school aquarium in the school aquarium, according to the store of Der Spiegel.

There is some skepticism that Teen Merz was a lot of robbers. Former classmate reminded that young Friedrich’s devastating behavior was more likely to want to want a “last word”.

Whether it is on or out of record, the people who knew him told me to enjoy beer and can really be fun, although it is a little power to offer an anecdote to illustrate it.

After school, he crossed the military service before studying the laws and wedding of the student charlotte of the gas 1981. Years.

The couple has three children.

Merz worked as a lawyer for several years, but he always had about politics and elected in the European Parliament in 1989. year, age 33 years.

“We were both quite young and very fresh and say untouched,” Dagmar Roth-Behrendt, who became MEP at the same time for the Social Democratic Party in the center-left.

She found a young Merz serious, reliable, honest and decent.

Even humorous – the quality that feels less apparently now: “I guess his amount of bruises could harden over time.”

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

“I would probably say no, in no way. Come on, he has to be kidding!”

Nevertheless, everyone knew that deeply ambitious and Merz soon overneached EU policies in the German national parliament, Bundestag, 1994. years.

He stared through the ranks, knocked like talent on the right-wing person, a traditionalist faction.

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

“Fighter,” says Willsch, will testify to the fact that Merz made three attempts to lead his entertainment.

His first two failures, 2018. and 20. January 2121. It could also be read as a sign of his fight to read wide.

But it returned to the early charged, when his ambitions initially pulled out, that he lost Angela Merkel in the foreigner of energy struggle.

Merkel, an underrated quantum chemist from the former Communist East and Merz, an open insured lawyer from the west, has never seen a lot of eyes.

Merz shines over this bitter episode on a short autobiographical post on the CDU site, saying that until 2009, he decided to leave the parliament to “make room for thinking.”

His years of thinking included a forging career in finances and corporate law – becoming the executive director of the Committee on various international companies and, reputable, millionaire.

It would have been more than a decade before returning to the parliament, where he has since asked to break Merkel’s doctrine CDU CSRETITIVISM.

The marked moment of political severance pay came at the end of January, when Friedrich Merz pushed through Nevezing movement to severe immigration rules, relying on votes from the final right alternative (AFD).

He insisted that there was no direct cooperation with AFD, but his move led to mass protests and condemned twice as many as Merkel.

These were rare public interventions by a woman who ruled Germany for 16 years.

Dentractors said it was an unforgivable electoral gambit, but supporters insisted on Merz, in fact, looking for people smartly to lure people from the ultimate right.

He risked alienating moderate parts of the voter Saturday before, voting in the 1990s in relation to the bill, which included the criminalization of marital rape.

He later explained that he thought that marital rape was already a crime, and there were other issues in the law he objected.

Surveys suggest that it is not particularly popular among young people and women – but Klaus-Peter Willsch believes that the picture painted in German media is unfair.

“I had it a few times in my election unit,” he tells me. “After that, women come up with and say it’s a good guy.”

Charlotte Merz also came to his defense, saying Westfalenpost, “What some write about my husband’s picture, it’s just not true.”

He says that their marriage was one of the mutual support: “We both took care of each other and shared children in such a way that it was compatible with our professional obligations.”

Regardless of the criticism, one EU diplomat told me that Brussels is eagerly awaiting their arrival. “

“It’s time to move from this German dead end and run that engine.”