M. Beisenherz: Sorry, I’m here privately
One year Friedrich Merz as CDU leader: Fritze aus dem Frost
© Illustration: Dieter Braun/stern
One year Friedrich Merz – our columnist has to think of a film with Sylvester Stallone in which a lot breaks.
By Mickey Beisenherz
30 years ago, Sylvester Stallone landed a hit with the film “Demolition Man”. In it he plays a cop who, after decades of hibernation, is thawed out and uses his antiquated methods to really clean up a helplessly softened future. The film is from 1993 and somehow Merz – too.
Soon the Sauerland will celebrate one year as CDU boss, and anyone who looks at his work might think of this film. As if the Union had successfully got its party leader out of the cryochamber, the man took off and, with the sensitivity of a lignite excavator, leveled his way through a hopelessly marked society.
Friedrich Merz in three attempts to the CDU boss
The first thing to note is his persistence. It’s not as if everyone in Germany longed for the man from Brilon, not even among the Christian Democrats. He needed a whopping three attempts to make it to the top and to take on the thin legacy of hapless figures like Armin Laschet and Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer.
Three. Others would have waved it off long ago and stayed on their supervisory boards. Not so Iron Fritz. You can find that downright menderesque in his lack of precipitation – or compare him to another Stallone character: Rocky Balboa. As smart people like to say, falling down is also a forward movement.
Yes, this Merz is convinced that he is the right first man for his party. And the first year wasn’t that bad. What he undoubtedly succeeds in is the role of opposition leader. Even a – oh yes – constructive one. Last but not least, thanks to the Union faction leader, even the chancellor with the mind of an iguana, Olaf Scholz suddenly gets a pulse beyond the 30 zone. Bundestag debates can be watched again because they are no longer dominated by the moldy, rotten fungus infestation of the AfD, which is decomposing everything, but by real arguments about the matter. That’s good.
Verbal gaffes like “little pashas”
When it comes to what the Union doesn’t want, Merz is on top. He is significantly less strong when it comes to what the CDU wants to be. What does the party stand for? In the struggle for a conservative profile, the hobby pilot likes to rhetorically crash into the house wall. As soon as he has the upper hand in discussions, his impulse control gets stuck, and verbal gaffes like “social tourism” and the “little pashas” come out. Everything that has been saved on conservative capital is smashed.
The old Leitkultur wolf who wants to move the party a good deal to the right again. Do you want to choose one?
Merz should almost be grateful for a polyester hooligan like Hans-Georg Maassen, who can be pointed out in such moments. “How? ‘Little Pashas’ is bad? Here, the guy with the ‘red-green racial theory’ – he’s the right-wing extremist here!” Wanting to kick someone out of the CDU makes you look much more middle-of-the-road than your own shooting club rhetoric would lead you to expect.
When federal elections are coming up, someone will have to gently teach him that the party imagines more moderate people like “Comrade Günther” or Outfittery MP Wüst in the future.
By then at the latest it should be as chilly as in the cooling chamber from which they got the “Self-Demolition Man” back then.