Have you ever considered that Friedrich Merz could actually be the next Chancellor? It was never really taken seriously. After the years with Angela Merkel, we first had to get used to the next chancellor, so you don’t immediately think about the one after that. Olaf Scholz would also be only the second head of government after Kurt Georg Kiesinger to fail for re-election. Can this be?
Merz has to first become a candidate for chancellor. Even in the Union there are great doubts about him: a man who has avoided politics for so many years? Who has never ruled before? Who would be around 70 if he moved into the Chancellery in 2025? A man who appears like a phantom from a bygone era, a projection figure for frustrated conservatives? A CDU chairman who doesn’t exactly come across as a popular figure? Who is said not to be well received by female voters and whose emotional fuse is considered to be quite short? This man should win the next election, whenever it takes place? Now let’s take a moment.
Friedrich Merz tasted six bottles of wine when a former colleague bet on his return to politics in 2018. I thought that was impossible. But my colleague Stefan Braun had a good nose. Probably because he used to work at Stern. Since this fiasco, I have been cautious with predictions against Merz.
Merz has the absolute will you need to become chancellor. He struggled through three chairmanship elections in the CDU, endured two defeats, endured humiliation and never gave up. Do you really think he endured that only to hand over the candidacy for chancellor to someone else? As CDU leader, Merz provoked people with his words about little pashas, got tangled up in his dealings with the AfD, said nonsense about refugees in dental practices and received a lot of criticism, including from within his own ranks. And? Did it harm him?
The Union is polling around 30 percent. That’s not outstanding, but not bad either, at least well above the last election result. The opposite applies to Olaf Scholz and his government. Shortly before the second anniversary of their existence, the Chancellor and his coalition are doing disastrously in the polls, also without a complete budget for 2023 and without a budget for 2024. The government neither has much trust among the citizens nor does it have confidence in itself itself. If the Union wins the election, it will also be because the competition is so weak. But you know that from 2021, it was just the other way around.
The Constitutional Court’s ruling on the debt brake could now be the decisive test for Merz. His group initiated the proceedings in Karlsruhe and won. The temptation to prolong the government’s inactivity for as long as possible is great for an opposition leader.
But countries led by the CDU are also suffering from the consequences of the ruling. The first prime ministers are already toying with easing the debt brake, which Merz does not want. And perhaps some ambitious prime minister is toying with the chance to force the CDU leader into a jam from which he cannot get out.
And if so? What if Merz survives this predicament unscathed?
I won’t bet against him anymore.
