BBC Berlin correspondent
He is a man who is intended for the next German leader: the antidote in the European confidence crisis, his supporters say.
Friedrich Merz is a well -known face of the old guardian of his conservative party. Politically, he never came across exciting.
Yet, his explosive offer to tighten the rules of migration with the support of the ultimate right voices in parliament reveals a man who is willing to gamble by breaking the main taboo.
This also marks another clear break from the party party Certrist (CDU), under his former rival of the party Angela Merkel.
Although Merz ultimately failed to change the law, he launched lightning to the election campaign he had launched Cancer Government Cancer Olaf Scholz Late last year.
Known by Merkel before becoming a chancellor, he completely left Parliament to continue his lucrative series of corporate affairs and was written as yesterday’s man.
But there is a sense of inevitability that this 69-year-old child’s return could be at the height of a job he wanted for so long.
This is January 2, one month, a month until the federal elections of Germany, and people gathered at one of the five -star Berlin hotels to hear Merz maintaining foreign policy policy.
The sound around the “Bale” at the De Rome Hotel is not very electric – but it is far from 20 years old, when his political career looked at.
Merz is also a licensed pilot, which in 2022 criticized for flying to the northern Sylt Island on his private plane for a wedding colleague of politicians Christian Lindner.
While on stage at the De Rome Hotel, a decent applause for the leader of the German conservative opposition to the CDU, which is consistent in front of the polling station.
High, slender, in suit and glasses, Merz reduces a peaceful, conventional, business character as he tries to project a willingness for power.
But it was a winding trip to this point.
Merz was born in the West Germany of Brilon in 1955 in a prominent conservative, Catholic family.
His father served as a local judge as well as his wife Friedrich Merz Charlotte to this day.
The younger Merz joined the CDU while still in school.
In an interview, 25 years ago, with a German newspaper, Tagesspiegel exposed the claim of wild young people than his resume covered with pasta could suggest.
Among his unfortunates he described racing streets on a motorcycle, hanging out with friends from a lace stop and playing a cardboard game Doppelkopf in the back of the class.
The teenage party he mentioned ended up with a group of students who took the collective Pee in the school aquarium, according to the Der Spiegel magazine.
There is a certain skepticism that a teenager Merz was a big blow. The former classmate recalled that the young Friedrich’s disruptive behavior had more often meant simply a “last word”.
No matter what or outside the record, the people who knew him told me to enjoy a beer and that they could really be fun, although few were able to offer an anecdote to illustrate it.
After school, before studying the law and married student Charlotte Gass in 1981 to military service.
The couple has three children.
For several years, Merz worked as a lawyer, but he always had a view of politics and was elected to the European Parliament in 1989, at the age of 33.
“We were pretty young and very fresh and say,” says Dagmar Roth-Behrendt, who at the same time became a representative European program for the Social Democratic Party of the German (SPD) left to the left.
She found that young Merz was serious, reliable, honest and polite.
She is even humorous – the quality that feels less obvious: “I suppose the amount of bruises over time could harden.”
But did he find a potential chancellor’s career at the beginning of his career?
“I probably would say no, no way. Come on, you have to joke!”
Still, everyone knew him that he was deeply ambitious and Merz soon moved from EU policy from the German National Parliament, Bundestag, 1994.
He went through the ranks, he appeared as a talent on a more right -wing, traditionalist faction.
“He is a great speaker and a deep thinker,” says Klaus-Peter Willsch, a member of the CDU Bundestag who has known him for over 30 years.
“The fighter,” says Willsch, is testified by the fact that Merz tried to run his party.
His first two failures, in 2018 and January 2021, could also be read as a sign of his struggle to spread.
But again it was in early crabs, when his ambitions were initially demolished, she lost to Angela Merkel in the fight for the party.
Merkel, an underestimated quantum chemist from the former communist east, and Merz, a lawyer with apparently convincing from the west, has never seen a look in his eyes much.
Merz is due to this bitter episode in a short autobiographical post on the CDU website, saying that by 2009 he decided to leave Parliament to “make room for thinking.”
His years of thinking included a career in finance and corporate law – becoming an executive director in various international companies and, in accordance with respect to the Millionaire.
It would have passed more than a decade before returning to Parliament, where he has since sought to throw Merkelin more centrally doctrine about CDU conservatism.
The marked moment of the political severance pay came to the end of last month, when Friedrich Merz pushed the default proposal on stricter immigration rules, relying on the votes of the extremely right alternative Für Deutschland (AFD).
He insisted that there was no direct collaboration with AFD, but his move led to mass protests and twice condemned by no one else than Merkel Sam.
These are rare public interventions women who ruled Germany for 16 years.
Detractors say it will be an unforgivable election gambite that will benefit from AFD, but fans insist that Merz actually wants to wise people from the far right.
He had previously risked alienation of a more moderate part of the electorate, voting in the 1990s against the proposal of the law involving the criminalization of marital rape.
He later explained that marital rape considered that he was already a crime, and other issues were objected to the proposal of the law.
Polls suggest that it is not particularly popular with young people and women – but Klaus -Peter Willsch believes that the image painted in German media is unjust.
“I had it several times in my constituency,” he tells me. “After that, women come and say it’s a good guy.”
Charlotte Merz also came to his defense, saying Westfalenpost: “What some write about the image of my husband about women is simply not true.”
He says their marriage is one of the supports: “We both took care of each other’s job and distributed children to children in such a way that he was compatible with our professional obligations.”
Its popularity will be made for the test as the choices approach, and the guesses are also focused less on whether to win and more they could form a coalition with.
Some observers fear that trust among potential coalition partners is damaged by Merz’s experimental approach to a tacit cooperation with AFD – a party with which he insists that he will never manage.
Regardless of the criticism, an EU diplomat told me that Brussels “eagerly awaited his arrival.”
“It’s time to start from this German downtime and start that engine.”
