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Judging by the excitement in the room, you would think it was the Second Coming. Which in terms of German politics it was.
Friedrich Merz held a press conference this week that electrified the Berlin political establishment. One of the leading conservatives of his generation, he quit the Bundestag nearly 10 years ago. Now he is back, trying to succeed Angela Merkel as leader of the Christian Democratic Union. It could turn into one of the most surprising political comebacks in recent German history.
Before the massed ranks of the media, at a venue a stone’s throw from the chancellery, Mr Merz said the CDU needed a “new start”, and that he would provide it. The party had to “clarify its brand”, sharpen its profile and welcome back all those disaffected conservatives who had drifted to the far-right Alternative for Germany.
“We can’t allow a situation where voters, out of frustration and disappointment with the established parties, join such populist movements,” he said. “CDU members and voters expect a clear course at a time of radical change.”
In five weeks, 1,001 delegates to the CDU party conference in Hamburg will elect their new leader. Mr Merz is one of three candidates with a serious chance of winning.
If he does, it could mark a turning point for one of Europe’s most successful right-of-centre parties. A conservative with strong views on immigration and national identity, Mr Merz could pull the CDU in a new direction, with big implications for domestic politics and Germany’s role in Europe.
What lends a certain piquancy to Mr Merz’s comeback attempt is the identity of the woman who stymied his career 16 years ago, Ms Merkel. It was she who dislodged him from the job of head of the CDU group in the Bundestag and leader of the opposition. Seven years later he quit parliament and pursued a career in business.
A Merz victory would trigger a political earthquake in Berlin. Ms Merkel, who on Monday announced she was stepping down as party leader after the CDU crashed to its worst election result in the western state of Hesse in more than 50 years, said she wanted to remain chancellor till 2021. But it is inconceivable to many that she can hang on to power with her old antagonist as CDU party boss.
“Conflict between the two of them would be pre-programmed,” said Dorothée de Nève, a political scientist at Justus Liebig University Giessen. “For that reason I doubt whether a majority of CDU delegates will actually back him for party leader.”
They might opt instead for Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, the CDU secretary-general, who is a Merkel loyalist and likely to be able to form an effective working relationship with the chancellor, Ms de Nève said.
A lawyer, Mr Merz began his political career as a member of the European Parliament and was elected to the Bundestag in 1994. He quickly established himself as one of the CDU’s chief spokesmen on financial matters.
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With his famous line that a tax return should be so simple it could be written on a beer mat, he earned a reputation as an economic liberal and reformer. Political observers remember him as a brilliant orator whose duels with the then Social Democratic finance minister Oskar Lafontaine were legendary.
“They were some of the best debates in the history of the Bundestag,” said Peter Siebenmorgen, author of a new book on the CDU. “The way he defeated the Christian Democrats’ most dangerous opponent impressed the other CDU MPs enormously. That’s where the myth of Merz originated.”
That myth grew after he was cut down in his prime. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung daily referred to him on Thursday as the “James Dean” of German politics, a man who died early enough to achieve hero status.
“Merz represents a time in which the world of the CDU was still in order, when there was no AfD and a 40 per cent share of the vote was in sight,” it said.
He is also from an era when the CDU was a more robustly conservative party. In 2000 he coined the word “Leitkultur”, or the dominant German culture, which he said immigrants had an obligation to embrace. It is an idea that has experienced a big revival on the right in the wake of the refugee crisis of 2015-16 that saw more than 1m migrants enter Germany.
Those socially conservative views were on display this week in Berlin. “In times of migration and globalisation, national identity and traditional values must have a firm place in our thoughts and actions,” Mr Merz told reporters.
Disappointed with the direction of the CDU under Ms Merkel, whom many traditionalists accuse of dragging the party too far to the centre ground of German politics, Mr Merz quit the Bundestag in 2009 and returned to his career as a lawyer.
He headed Atlantic Bridge, a non-governmental organisation that promotes closer ties between the US and Germany and later became chairman of BlackRock Germany, a job that made him a millionaire.
That could prove a liability, with Germans less tolerant of politicians who switch to the world of business and back again than Americans. Some commentators have likened BlackRock to the “locust-like” financial investors so vilified by the German left.
Mr Merz has insisted BlackRock is no locust or private equity fund but is an asset management firm that carefully looks after its investors’ money. And, he said, he didn’t “run” it, but only “oversees” it.
But the question on every journalist’s lips was not about his career in business but his future relationship with Ms Merkel, should he be elected party boss.
He said they would find a way to work together. “I am firmly convinced that Angela Merkel and I will get on with each other and be able to deal with each other under these changed conditions,” he said. For many observers in Berlin, that sounds like a pious hope.
