He’s had to scale back his ambitions accordingly. Immediately after the election, however, he and his coalition partners pressured the outgoing Bundestag to amend the constitution to allow record borrowing for spending on defense, infrastructure and the fight against climate change. The hope was to lay the groundwork for a turning point in the country’s trajectory. Instead, the perception is that — aside from promises on military spending — Germany’s course has remained largely unchanged.
A promised cut in household energy taxes never materialized, nor did Merz’s loudly announced “autumn of reforms.” Although he once called tax increases “poison,” high earners are now bracing for more of them. On migration, the government can point to lower asylum numbers, but deportations remain limited. And the larger economic ailments persist: high energy prices, heavy taxes and levies, a runaway bureaucracy and deindustrialization, which is no longer something on the horizon but a growing reality.
In fact, rather than being seen as a break from the past, Merz has begun to remind many Germans of Merkel. But a former CDU federal minister, who also spoke to me on condition of anonymity, argued that the comparison is unfair in one crucial respect: Merkel would never have allowed herself to be boxed in by a coalition partner.
As an example, he pointed to a recent relief package: a temporary cut in fuel taxes and a tax-free bonus of up to €1,000 for employees. Merz had expressed doubts about that kind of response to rising energy prices right until the coalition’s final negotiating session. Then he signed off on it. Merkel, the former minister said, would never have entered talks from such a position. And she would never have let her partners make her look weak.
Christian Lindner, Germany’s former finance minister, put it more acidly. “Friedrich Merz won his chancellorship with positions and promises that stand in contradiction to the positions and actions that now define his chancellorship,” he told me. “It remains an open question how this break, unprecedented in its scope, will affect our country’s political culture.”
Lindner, 47, was the leader of the Free Democrats, but his parliamentary career ended when the FDP crashed out of the Bundestag in the last election. He has since left politics and joined the executive board of Autoland, Germany’s largest independent car dealership.