Who’s Merz?!From Germany 🇩🇪

Wrote  by our reporter volfgang graf van netterfeld

He has joined the Bundestag again as a lawmaker and seems willing to embark on a course of modernization of his party. First, he proposed former Berlin Health Senator Mario Czaja, 46, to become CDU general secretary and 34-year-old Christina Stumpp as deputy general secretary — a post that still needs to be created.

Merz was also keen to ensure that the newly elected members of the CDU’s federal executive board would include significantly more women than before.

In recent weeks, Merz has repeatedly stated his clear rejection of any cooperation between his party and the AfD. And he spoke out in favor of changing legislation to allow LGBTQ couples to adopt children. This clearly contradicts the earlier positions of the conservative politician.

The message is clear: Merz wants to win back young voters, many of whom had turned to the neoliberal Free Democrats (FDP) and the environmentalist Green Party in the September 2021 general election.

Merz is a staunch European and wants the bloc to be economically, financially and strategically assertive toward China, Russia and the US. Before joining Germany’s federal parliament in 1994, he had been a lawmaker in the European Parliament for five years.

And he has strong trans-Atlantic connections. In the past 10 years, nobody from the CDU leadership has been to the US more often than Merz, who says he is impressed by that country’s economic liberalism.

“We’d get along fine,” said Merz in 2020 of then-President Donald Trump.

Update January 22, 2022:

This article has been translated from German and has been updated to reflect the most recent developments.