The Christian Democrats of Germany (CDU) voted in favor of electing Friedrich Mertz as the new leader of the center-right party at a digital party conference.
Mertz garnered the support of 915 delegates out of 983 who voted digitally – winning the overwhelming majority of over 94%.
Speaking before the vote, Mertz noted that the party has experienced turbulent times over the past three years, but promised a new beginning.
“This time is now behind us,” he said, adding that his election as the party’s new leader was a “strong” message for the CDU renewal.
It had previously garnered more than 60% support from CDU members in December. Mertz’s election to the top of the party was certain, but observers watched closely to see how many representatives would not support him. The overwhelming support from the delegates puts him on a solid footing as he takes over the reins of the party.
The CDU was founded in 1945 after World War II. Konrad Adenauer was its first president and became the first chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949. Since then, the CDU has led the German government for a total of 52 years.
Now Friedrich Mertz is running a party that is limited to the opposition for the next three years, and must sit next to the far-right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the Bundestag plenary.
Conservative roots
Mertz announced his intention to rebuild the party and pledged to address “all issues that our party considers important”. He said he would try to unite the party so that different political ideas, views and currents could find their place in it again.
Merz, a commercial lawyer born in 1955, hails from a rural area of Germany’s most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia. He is a devout Catholic and has been married to Charlotte’s wife, a district court judge, since 1981. They have three older children.
Excellent speaker, sometimes stumbles when under pressure. He once suggested the possibility of being able to file a tax return “on a beer mat” instead of having to fill out pages with forms. However, he could not answer how this would be implemented in practice.
Locking horns with Merkel
He first joined the German parliament in 1994, and even then, along with former Chancellor Angela Merkel, they stood in different camps within the Conservative party.
Merkel was supported by the younger members of the party, Mertz was clearly more traditionally conservative. He lost the battle to lead the party’s parliamentary group in 2002, resigned from the party leadership in 2004 and left parliament in 2009.
He then made a career in business, most recently as the head of the German branch of a large American investment company, BlackRock.
The multi-millionaire with a pilot license has long complained about bureaucratic hurdles for companies due to regulatory requirements, for example, for environmental protection.
When Merkel announced in 2018 that she would step down as party president, Mertz announced his candidacy – but lost to Merkel’s protégée Annegret Krab-Karenbauer. When he stepped down after a series of blunders, Merz took his chance again in early 2021, but had to give in to Armin Laschet, who then lost the German general election later that year.
Change of course for the CDU
Both Kramp-Karrenbauer and Laschet were supporters of Angela Merkel’s modest political course, which Merz has always been critical of.
But from the CDU’s extremely poor performance in the Bundestag elections in September 2021, if not before, Merz changed his tune.
He became a member of the Bundestag again as an MP and seems willing to embark on a process of modernizing his party. He first nominated former Berlin Health Senator Mario Czaja, 46, to become secretary general of the CDU, and Christina Stump, 34, as deputy secretary general – a position that has yet to be created.
Mertz also wanted to ensure that the newly elected members of the CDU federal executive council would include significantly more women than before.
In recent weeks, Mertz has repeatedly stated his clear rejection of any cooperation between his party and the AfD. And he advocated a change in legislation that would allow LGBTQ couples to adopt children. This is in clear contradiction to the previous positions of the conservative politician.
The message is clear: Mertz wants to win back new voters, many of whom had turned to the neo-liberal Free Democrats (FDP) and the environmental Greens in the September 2021 general election.
Mertz is an ardent European and wants the bloc to be economically, financially and strategically demanding of China, Russia and the United States. Prior to joining the German Federal Parliament in 1994, he was a Member of the European Parliament for five years.
And it has strong transatlantic connections. For the past 10 years, no one in the CDU leadership has been to the United States more often than Merz, who says he is impressed by the country’s economic liberalism. “We would do well,” Mertz said in 2020 to then-President Donald Trump.
Update January 22, 2022: This article has been translated from German and updated to reflect the latest developments.
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