Germany’s tough and stern ‘chancellor-in-waiting’ vows to end Germany’s migrant crime nightmare

Friedrich Merz, the Right-wing CDU party leader, calls out ‘incapable and leaderless’ government

As he stormed out of a meeting on border security with the German government this week, Friedrich Merz, the opposition leader, had a spring in his step.
The Right-wing CDU party chief, a hobby pilot and former BlackRock executive, has waited decades for his chance to become the next chancellor of Germany.
Now it could be within reach, with chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition seen as hopelessly weak on border security, and with national elections fast approaching.
Last month’s stabbing attack by a Syrian refugee at a music festival in the western town of Solingen has put border security at the top of the political agenda in Germany.
It has also handed Mr Merz a chance to relentlessly attack the government on migration, forcing Mr Scholz to announce new border controls that will come into effect on Monday.
“This country needs to be able to live in freedom and security once again,” Mr Merz thundered after the Solingen attack, which killed three people, vowing to end Germany’s migrant crime “nightmare”.
The CDU leader has demanded that Germany transforms its border security policy: rather than just carry out extra checks, he says, it should be turning away illegal migrants on a “comprehensive scale”.
When a crunch meeting with German ministers on Tuesday failed to meet that commitment, he simply walked out, branding the government “incapable and leaderless”.
It is a remarkable shift in tone for a leader of the CDU, the centre-Right party formerly led by Angela Merkel, who threw open Germany’s borders amid the 2016 refugee crisis with the slogan “wir schaffen das” (we can handle it).
Mr Merz, 68, was born in the town of Brilon, West Germany – another contrast with Mrs Merkel, who was deeply marked by her experience growing up in the Communist GDR in the east.
Pro-business and socially conservative, he lost a power struggle with Mrs Merkel two decades ago, which in turn prompted a hiatus from politics for the legal profession and the corporate world.
But when Mrs Merkel stepped down in 2018, he swept back into the CDU as leader and pushed the party in a decidedly more populist direction, having coined the phrase “Leitkultur” (dominant culture) in Germany.
CDU insiders describe him as a tough, stern leader who has imported American-style management from his time at BlackRock into the party. He is rumoured to have once been a member of the Andean Pact, a secretive all-male society for CDU rising stars.
“When he comes into the room, everyone goes quiet, like when the schoolteacher comes in,” one source said. “And he can be really tough on people, to the point of being rude.”
Early on in his role as leader, insiders say he quickly tired of lengthy CDU meetings in the German parliament, which tend to start at 3pm and can drag on until as late as 9pm.
They are now cut short at 5pm, which irked colleagues who enjoyed making long, meandering speeches; some feel their leader is more impatient than efficient.
One source said Mr Merz insists on taking his staffers out for a beer, and picking up the tab, after a tough day. Unlike Mrs Merkel, known to the world as “Mutti” (Mummy), he has no nickname, and is simply “Herr Merz” to his staffers.
Mr Merz’s foreign policy is broadly supportive of Ukraine, with his party heaping pressure on Mr Scholz to provide Kyiv with powerful Taurus long-range missiles, albeit unsuccessfully.
“He seems to me to be quite an opportunistic politician who seizes whatever opportunity he can to stick it to the Scholz government,” said Minna Alander, an expert on German politics and European security. “In the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion, [his focus was] Ukraine – he demonstratively went to Kyiv before Scholz – now it’s migration.
“I don’t think, however, that he really cares much about Ukraine,” she added, alluding to his notorious comment in September 2022 that Ukrainian refugees were indulging in “welfare tourism”. He later apologised for the remark.
His road to the chancellery has a major obstacle: support for the hard-Right AfD is surging in Germany, with the party taking first place in the Thuringia state elections in September.
The CDU risks losing voters in droves to the AfD, largely owing to its muscular rhetoric on radical Islam and migration, and its abhorrence of German military support for Ukraine, which it fears will drag the country into a global conflict.
Benjamin Höhne, a German political scientist at the Chemnitz University of Technology, said: “Merz’s big promise to the CDU was to push through a more conservative party profile. Now the migration issue seems to have become his theme, with which he wants to be associated.”
“However, it remains to be seen whether this will help the CDU achieve better election results or whether the Right-wing populist AfD will benefit because this is one of its core issues,” he added.
Earlier this month, Mr Merz veered closer still to the AfD’s rhetoric on migration, saying migrants are behind the “nightmare” of gang rapes and accusing young migrant men of a “complete lack of respect” for women.
Mr Merz is expected by many in his party to become a much closer friend of Ukraine than Mr Scholz was, should the CDU win the next general election in late 2025.
“On the most important topic of our time, namely restoring peace and security in Europe, Friedrich Merz, unlike Olaf Scholz, listens,” said Norbert Röttgen, a senior CDU MP and a leading Ukraine supporter in the party.
“Merz understands that Russia will only negotiate when Ukraine has militarily won the upper hand and when there is no way left for [Vladimir] Putin to achieve his objectives militarily. Scholz, in contrast, believes that he knows everything best himself,” he added.
“Friedrich Merz [has] made it clear how important a victory for Ukraine is for the European security architecture,” said Roderich Kiesewetter, the CDU’s crisis prevention spokesman and one of the party’s more hawkish voices on Russia.
In an apparent attempt to wrestle back control of the migration debate, Mr Scholz’s interior minister announced this week that Germany will impose nationwide border checks for six months, starting on Monday.
Critics noted that Germany already imposes such controls at four of its eastern borders, including Poland and Austria. Whether the new measures will have much impact remains to be seen, and they clearly do not go far enough for Mr Merz.
But CDU allies hope that his energetic, brisk style will make him far more attractive than Mr Scholz – who is considered slow and staid by comparison – to voters in 2025.
“He doesn’t want to waste time. He’s always in a hurry,” one source said. “He’s focused on getting things done.”