Germany’s Friedrich Merz talks tough amid far-right surge

Friedrich Merz is not just a model of political perseverance, he also wants to be German chancellor. He is already halfway there. A 67-year-old millionaire lawyer and hobby pilot, he overcame remarkable odds – and two failed attempts – to become leader of the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in January 2022.

Now his party is halfway through its first term in opposition in nearly 20 years, leading all German opinion polls with between 27 and 31 per cent support.

But all is not well in Europe’s most influential centre-right party. Frustration is growing over whether the CDU’s perma-tanned, lanky leader – two centimetres shy of two meters tall – is doing enough to counter a surge in support for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).

More than anywhere else, how Merz tackles the AfD will decide whether he is let loose on Olaf Scholz in 2025 to try to take back the chancellery. If he fails, Merz will be finished: a cautionary morality tale about being careful what you wish for.

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The eldest of four children from Westphalian Hugenot stock, Merz stood out as a young man for his rhetorical skills and razor-sharp mind. Angela Merkel watched him closely 25 years ago, appointing him her deputy leader – then dumping him before he became dangerous.

A great political rivalry was born and, when she quit as CDU leader in 2018, Merz announced his return after years in the political wilderness. After a concerted Merkel campaign to hinder him, and two CDU leadership failures, Merz finally claimed his CDU crown.

Where Merkel was a pragmatic centrist, he is more centre-right value conservative, economic liberal. But is an old-school Christian Democrat what the CDU – or voters – need in 2023? Since his comeback Merz has seemed, at times, a touch anachronistic in a changed landscape of personality-driven identity politics, supercharged by social media.

Making his first move last week, he hired a new general secretary with an attack-dog reputation. Hours earlier, to a small group of foreign journalists, he warned that Germany has gone to the dogs because of spiralling bureaucracy, slumping investment, high taxes and non-wage costs. No one was indelicate enough to ask how much of this was down to 16 years of Merkel CDU politics. Instead Merz came to life by railing against how more Germans than ever are working, but fewer hours are being worked.

“The four-day week and work-life balance are all fine but the price for that is a drop in prosperity,” he said. “These are questions we are going to have to ask: how much are we prepared to work in Germany?”

Merz has his work cut out for him as opposition leader, trying to present winning proposals for the major political challenges of the day – security, climate and immigration – without following the lead in Sweden and Finland, and possibly Spain after its election next weekend, to throw his lot in with the far right.

In a decade, Germany’s AfD has morphed from an anti-bailout initiative to a full-on anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim populist force. Now it is breathing down the CDU’s neck with 20 per cent support, occupying second place in opinion polls.

Merz sees the party as “enemies of our democracy” and points out how, according to poll analysis, two thirds of current AfD support is based on protest with the political mainstream “and not out of right-wing nationalist conviction, so they and can still be won over by other parties”.

As these parties struggle to find palatable political answers in Berlin, however, the AfD is burrowing deep into German political structures beyond the capital. Even before it secured its first mayor and county managers positions earlier this month, AfD councillors have built up co-operation with other parties – in particular the CDU – in local politics, normalising co-operation with the party despite what Merz calls an “intact firewall to the AfD”.

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“We have a party conference resolution against co-operation with the CDU in state parliaments, the Bundestag and European Parliament,” he said. “At local level we will have to look how we work with AfD officials.”

Things could get messy next year given Germany has local and municipal elections in nine states as well as three state elections, including in Brandenburg and Saxony where the AfD are polling 28 per cent support each.

“I don’t want to relativise the dimension of the problem, but it is not completely unknown,” he says, pointing to the last AfD surge to 18 per cent during the last refugee wave. So far this year Germany has taken in 150,000 people seeking asylum and, without change, is heading for its third-largest number on record by December.

For Merz, the signal is clear: “We have to solve the refugee problem as quickly as possible. If the numbers go down, so, too, will the AfD numbers.”

But as a pan-EU migration deal moves from European leaders to the European Parliament in advance of next year’s European elections, such a deal may well be hindered by hard- and far-right parties in Warsaw, Helsinki, Stockholm and elsewhere. All the more reason, Merz says, to strike Europe’s first migration agreement before the European elections.

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In a departure from the liberal policies pursued by Merkel – whom he never mentions by name – Merz makes clear he is already working on a tougher line on migration if he becomes chancellor: “If it is not possible to find European consensus [on migration], we will have no alternative but to protect our borders.”