BERLIN — Friedrich Merz is set to become Germany’s most American chancellor.
Never in history has a German head of government had more affinity for the United States. Merz has traveled to the U.S. over 100 times, by his own tally, and counts former U.S. President Ronald Reagan as one of his role models.
Merz, whose conservative alliance looks to have won Sunday’s national election with 29 percent of the vote, according to early official projections, is particularly fond of one Reagan quip that summarizes the German leader’s American-style skepticism of state intervention: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’”
But just as Merz is on the cusp of taking power in Germany, his cherished America has turned from indispensable friend to frenemy. Merz and other European mainstream leaders increasingly see the U.S. no longer a beacon — that “shining city upon a hill,” as Reagan liked to call it — but rather as another force joining Russia and China to steadily chip away at their ever-more brittle democracies.
“This is really now the change of an era,” Merz said on stage at the Munich Security Conference earlier this month after U.S. Vice President JD Vance gave a speech that cast Europe’s centrist parties — not Russia or China — as the greatest threat to European security. “If we don’t hear the wake-up call now,” Merz added, “it might be too late for the entire European Union.”
Vance’s appearance in Munich is likely to go down in European history as an epochal shift just as significant as Vladimir Putin’s 2007 speech at the same conference, when the Russian president effectively declared war on the U.S.-led liberal order. Now, it’s the U.S. administration itself that is turning its back on it.
German leaders, including Merz, have been especially slow to accept the new reality, declaring until recently that the transatlantic alliance will endure despite clear signals from the Trump administration that it will halt military aid for Ukraine, call into question the U.S. willingness to defend Europe and act to bolster far-right, Kremlin-friendly forces.
For Merz, an avowed transatlanticist, there could hardly be a ruder awakening. The question that will define his tenure will be whether he can lead Germany and Europe in defending the fraying liberal order without the U.S. — or whether, as Merz suggested in Munich, it’s already almost too late.
Merz’s rise and fall and rise again
This wasn’t how Merz had imagined his long-sought moment of victory.
Born a decade after the end of World War II in Sauerland, a rural, mountainous region of West Germany, Merz was, by his own account, a less than spectacular student and an early smoker and drinker prone to disciplinary problems. Despite that rebellious streak, he was influenced by the deeply embedded conservative culture of the area and joined the center-right Christian Democratic Union while still in high school. After serving a brief stint in the military, Merz went to university in Bonn, then the capital of West Germany, where he studied law.
Merz became a conservative member of the European Parliament in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell, and, five years later, was elected to the German Bundestag, where he developed a close relationship with Wolfgang Schäuble, the CDU stalwart and forceful advocate of European Union integration. Under Schäuble’s tutelage, Merz rose in stature and was considered a likely choice for chancellor candidate.
His rise ended in 2002, however, when he lost a power struggle with the more centrist Angela Merkel.
Source: ARD
Merz, seeing no role for himself in the CDU under Merkel, withdrew to the back benches, and, in the midst of the world financial crisis of 2008, published a paean to free markets titled “Dare for More Capitalism.” A year later, he left the Bundestag to work as a corporate lawyer while also taking the helm of Atlantik-Brücke, a lobbying organization advocating for transatlantic ties.
While with Atlantik-Brücke, Merz pushed for an EU-U.S. trade agreement — The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or TTIP — and forged closer connections with the U.S., networking with American politicians and corporate leaders. One of his favorite places in the U.S., he told biographer Volker Resing, is the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, where the former president is buried.
Over a decade in the private sector, Merz sat on a series of corporate boards, including a four-year stint with U.S. asset manager BlackRock, a time he counts as among the happiest in his life, according to biographer Resing. Merz says this time provided him valuable experience outside of politics, but his critics accuse him of simply using his political connections to lobby for powerful interests, making himself a millionaire in the process.
When Merkel stepped down as CDU leader in 2018, Merz saw an opportunity for his return to politics. Merkel’s centrism and generous refugee policies, Merz believed, opened up the CDU’s right flank and allowed the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, party. Merz set out to undo much of Merkel’s legacy and aimed to pull the CDU sharply to the right. The party, looking for reinvention after 16 years of Merkel and an election loss to Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic Party, or SPD, in 2021, eventually elected him as its chairman in early 2022, on his third attempt to get the job. “I am deeply moved,” Merz said after the vote, fighting back tears.
Risk-taker or populist?
Though Merz and his conservatives emerged victorious in the election Sunday, surveys suggest he’s not particularly popular among the public.
In a country that broadly retains a deep skepticism of the financial industry, Merz’s wealth and time at BlackRock, the American investment company, are often viewed with suspicion. It doesn’t help matters that Merz routinely jets around the country in his own twin-engine plane, which he flies himself, having fulfilled a lifelong dream of getting his pilot’s license in his 50s.
“Friedrich Merz is not really very beloved, but he is respected,” Günther Oettinger, a former senior CDU politician and European commissioner, told POLITICO near the end of last year.
Yet Merz also has a reputation for being impulsive, thin-skinned and prone to populist bluster, particularly when it comes to migration. His defenders say he’s merely a risk-taker — at trait he took from his years in the private sector — and someone who doesn’t shy away from a sharp-tongued debate.
Merz took one of his biggest gambles shortly before the election. After a series of high-profile attacks blamed on asylum-seekers in the months before the vote, Merz watched as his conservatives steadily declined in polls, while the AfD rose. In January, after a knife-wielding Afghan man in Bavaria attacked a group of preschool children in a park, killing one child and a man who was attempting to protect the children, Merz decided it was time for a drastic shift.
In a taboo-breaking move that weakened Germany’s postwar “firewall” around the far right, he and his conservatives aligned with the AfD to try to pass through parliament a series of tough immigration measures — including a proposal to reject asylum-seekers at the borders.
In response to Merz’s acceptance of AfD support, tens of thousands of outraged demonstrators turned out in cities across the country. “Merz can no longer be trusted,” said Scholz, whose center-left SPD came third in Sunday’s election. Robert Habeck, the chancellor candidate for the Greens, called Merz’s move “a disqualification” for the office of chancellor.
Voters, who were broadly supportive of Merz’s tough migration policies, ultimately disagreed, putting Merz in power.
The disenchanted transatlanticist
German conservatives have long hoped that Merz’s tough border policies, business background and familiarity with the U.S. will endear him to Donald Trump.
“Merz is one of the Germans who is best connected in the U.S.” said Thomas Silberhorn, a conservative lawmaker specializing in transatlantic ties. “In this respect, I am very confident. He also knows the way things work. He is used to the mindset that you have to speak plainly.”
Merz has vowed to make “deals” with Trump. In an interview last month, he suggested Germany could get on Trump’s good side by buying American F-35 fighter jets and boosting defense spending so that Germany is consistently above the NATO spending target of 2 percent of gross domestic produce. Despite the U.S. president’s love of tariffs, Merz also floated the idea of trying to bring back negotiations on TTIP, which collapsed during the first Trump administration.
Until recently, however, Merz’s approach for confronting the Trump administration consisted mainly of denying the scale of the challenge.
Just one day before Vance’s speech at the MSC, Atlantik-Brücke, the transatlantic lobby group Merz formerly headed, published an essay of his on the transatlantic relationship. “Our alliance with America has been, is and will remain of paramount importance for security, freedom and prosperity in Europe,” Merz wrote. With Trump, he went on, “transatlantic relations will change again and yet we will continue to share common values, interests and a common promise of protection within NATO.”
A few days later, Merz’s tone drastically changed and he warned of a transatlantic rupture.
“The differences between the U.S. and Europe are taking on a whole new quality,” he wrote in a note to his supporters after Vance’s speech. “Now it is no longer ‘just’ about defense; now it is about our basic understanding of democracy and an open society.” Merz compared the moment to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, when, as he put it, “we woke up from our dreams and had to learn to understand that our world is no longer what it was supposed to be.”
German and European leaders became even more alarmed when Trump, a few days later, blamed Ukraine — not the Kremlin — for starting the war and then followed up by calling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a “dictator.”
After that, Merz warned supporters at a rally in the state of Hesse that the “autocratic behavior at the top of the state” in the U.S. may persist for a long time. “Our response can only be that we must finally become resilient, capable of defense, and able to stand on our own feet in Europe,” he added.
In an interview the following day, Merz warned that Europe should prepare for Trump to end NATO protection and hinted at a major strategic shift, saying Germany needed to discuss the possibility of “nuclear sharing, or at least nuclear security” with European nuclear powers the United Kingdom and France. Previously, German conservatives have favored maintaining strong ties with the U.S. over calls from Paris to cultivate European “strategic autonomy.”
Merz’s rhetorical shift showed just how unnerved he now is by the Trump administration. The question now is whether Germany’s next chancellor will succeed at taking the EU — itself confronting the rise of Russia-friendly, far-right parties — in a fundamentally new direction.
Merz in now expressing the willingness, though the way forward remains murky.
“Within this Europe, Germany must play a leading role,” Merz said at the rally in Hesse. We must take on this responsibility,” he added. “I, for one, am determined to do so.”
Nette Nöstlinger and Rasmus Buchsteiner contributed to this report.
Who is Friedrich Merz? Meet Europe’s most powerful leader as US turns its back
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