The man most likely to replace Olaf Scholz as chancellor of Germany after the coalition government fell on Monday earned his fortune working in the private sector before returning to politics at 63.
That business background may be encouraging for many Germans as the political turbulence bedeviling one of Europe’s most powerful economies has been caused, in part, by the country’s stagnant economy.
If the polls hold, Mr. Scholz’s successor as chancellor could be Friedrich Merz, the now 69-year-old leader of the rival conservative-centrist Christian Democratic Union. He is offering to get the German economic engine humming again after years of stagnation.
“You are leaving the country in one of the greatest economic crises in postwar history,” he said to Mr. Scholz in front of lawmakers on Monday, shortly before he voted against him in the confidence vote.
“He’s trying to bring back the Germany that works,’’ said Sudha David-Wilp, the Berlin-based regional director of the German Marshall Fund, a research organization. He added that Mr. Merz was looking to create an environment “where the economy is producing and there’s high growth.”
How Germany got here
Mr. Scholz’s loss of the vote of confidence in Parliament on Monday means the end of his coalition government and an early vote for a new legislature, most likely by February. Polls show that many Germans hold him responsible for the failures of his squabbling, three-party coalition, which included the Greens and the Free Democrats.
Before this week’s no confidence vote, the country’s next elections had been set to be held in September, and the main political parties were already preparing, with the party candidates for chancellor already clear. The collapse of Mr. Scholz’s government only accelerated the timing.
Presently, about 18 percent of German voters say they would cast ballots for Mr. Scholz’s Social Democrats, far less than the roughly 32 percent who say they prefer Mr. Merz’s Christian Democrats.
But when asked about his opponent, Mr. Scholz said recently that he was happy that it was Mr. Merz and not someone else from the deep conservative bench running against him.
“I think I’m somewhat cooler than him,” Mr. Scholz said on public TV in November.
Several candidates, but none are particularly popular
Among the four men leading the mainstream parties going into the elections, none are particularly popular, said Stefan Merz, a director at Infratest dimap, a polling company, who is not related to the leader of the Christian Democratic Union.
But in a recent survey by Infratest, 30 percent of respondents said they liked the work the other Mr. Merz was doing, putting him ahead in a field of four.
Stefan Merz noted that among a slate of unappealing candidates, the Christian Democrat leader was arguably the least weak. “If the Union should win the election, which at the moment everything points to, then it is mainly due to the political issues and not necessarily because of Friedrich Merz,” he said.
Rising through the ranks
Mr. Merz was born and still lives in the Sauerland, a district of western Germany known for hills, heavy food and picturesque nature. It was from there that he was first elected into the European Parliament in 1989 and then the German Parliament in 1994, which was then still in the West German capital, Bonn.
While he comes from the same party as former Chancellor Angela Merkel, Mr. Merz, a pugnacious old-school politician, is in many ways the polar opposite of Ms. Merkel.
He rose through the ranks to lead the Christian Democrats’ parliamentary group, but was soon ousted by another star in the party — Ms. Merkel. It was then that Mr. Merz pivoted from politics and started a lucrative law career.
“I liked the fact that he was also power-conscious,” Ms. Merkel wrote about Mr. Merz in her recently published autobiography. “But there was a problem right from the start: We both wanted to be the boss.”
Mr. Merz got rich working as a lawyer and a lobbyist. Before returning to politics, he was the supervisory board chairman of the German subsidiary of BlackRock, the American investment company.
It was only when Ms. Merkel was getting ready to retire that Mr. Merz got back into politics. When he returned to the political stage, in 2018, he promised he could reduce the success of the far-right Alternative for Germany party, known by its Germany initials AfD, by moving his party further right on key issues like migration.
While his leadership has not resulted in lower poll numbers for the AfD, it might help stop his C.D.U. party from losing more voters, as it did to the far right during the Merkel years, analysts say.
Mr. Merz re-entered Parliament in 2021 and — after two failed attempts — won the party leadership in 2022 and worked to unify members around him.
“On the one hand, he has to get past his profile as being a man from yesterday and convince women and maybe some left-leaning voters that his brand of conservatism is not going to put those voters in jeopardy,” said Ms. David-Wilp. “And at the same time,” she added, “he also wants to convince voters of his knowledge of a Germany that worked well.”
Merz missteps
As party leader, however, Mr. Merz has made a number of gaffes and is known for statements that those on the left can find particularly irksome.
In September 2023, he claimed that refugees were having their teeth redone at taxpayers’ expense while regular German patients were unable to get appointments (the head of the German Dental Association denied this).
Early last year, he used an outmoded term for young immigrants in describing what he said was sexist behavior toward German teachers in school.
Despite his significant personal means, Mr. Merz, who has sat on the boards of nearly a dozen big companies and flies a personal two-propellor plane, has insisted that he is just a regular member of the middle class. This has angered has many Germans, who see him as being divorced from the economic reality many members of the middle class face.
Despite those mistakes, Mr. Merz has managed to coalesce his party around him and shift it to a more traditional conservative posture after Ms. Merkel’s long tenure took the party further to the left.
“In the past few years, Merz has used his time in opposition to rebuild the C.D.U.,” said Marianne Kneuer, a political scientist at the Technical University in Dresden. “He has also had the time to gain his own experience and to learn from the mistakes of his political opponents.”
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