Friedrich Merz
Friedrich Merz became Chancellor of Germany in May 2025 after a twenty-year detour into corporate law. Born in Brilon in Westphalia in 1955 into a Catholic legal family, he was a poor schoolboy who was moved schools for indiscipline, served in a tank unit, and trained as a lawyer and judge. He entered the European Parliament in 1989 and the Bundestag in 1994, and became leader of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group in 2000 as a rising figure of the economic right. Angela Merkel took the post from him in 2002 in a straightforward act of internal politics, and he left frontline politics in 2009. He then spent a decade in corporate law and finance, chairing the German arm of BlackRock and sitting on numerous boards, which made him wealthy and gave his opponents a permanent line of attack. He returned after Merkel's retirement, lost the party leadership twice, and won it in 2022. The 2025 election was called early when Olaf Scholz's coalition collapsed. The CDU/CSU won with about twenty-eight per cent, and the AfD came second with over twenty. Weeks before taking office he pushed through a constitutional amendment exempting defence spending above one per cent of GDP from the debt brake and creating a five-hundred-billion-euro infrastructure fund — a reversal of positions he had campaigned on, and the largest fiscal shift in postwar German policy. He failed to win the chancellorship on the first parliamentary ballot, the first time that has happened, and was elected on the second the same day.
- Lived: 1955 CE – ?
- Nationality: German
- Roles: Chancellor of Germany (2025-present)
