Merkel’s Birthday Bash: Merz Steals the Spotlight with a Gift of Power
The CDU is organizing an event to mark Angela Merkel’s 70th birthday. Party leader Friedrich Merz is also celebrating – but not just the former Chancellor.
It seemed a little strained when Friedrich Merz and Angela Merkel entered the great hall of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences in Berlin on Wednesday through one of the stone arches. They smile, nod to each other, shake hands. That is enough for the audience.
Somehow it is fitting, because this path was not easy. Not for Merz – and obviously not for Merkel either. Since Merz took over as chairman of the party, it is said that there has been no meeting between the two. Now at least it worked this way. Around 200 people from politics and science came to honor the former Chancellor this Wednesday night. Art historian Horst Bredekamp will give the main speech.
Merz comes on stage, looks at his piece of paper and then at Merkel. For a long time there were considerations about how this day could be celebrated appropriately. “As a party, we said that the best honor is actually the fact that we take time together to talk about things that we have succeeded in – and that we haven’t succeeded so well in,” he said. leader of the UDP.
The party joked beforehand that Merz would have to overcome himself to make a speech about Merkel. In fact, it could be the other way around.
After ending her active political career, the former chancellor actually made it more than clear to what extent she wanted to continue to be involved with her party and the political world, which is not at all. No visits to party conferences, no joint appearances, and Merkel has even resigned from the CDU-affiliated Konrad Adenauer Foundation. The woman who led the party for 20 years, including 16 as chancellor, almost disappeared after she left.
According to one MP, when CSU leader Markus Söder met Merkel in the Federal Assembly in February 2022, he even asked: “What do you do all day now? Do you just write your memoirs? We don’t hear anything from you anymore.”
Merkel’s suspension is a blessing for at least one person: Friedrich Merz. Because the relationship between the leader of the UDP and his predecessor is not a particularly good one. For years, the two held a rivalry that went far beyond a sporting rivalry. It is said that Merz tried several times to undermine the CDU leader at the time. Without success. He won the power struggle back then. Only 12 years and three candidacies for party leadership later Merkel has retired and Merz the leader of the CDU.
It’s almost strange that he, of all people, should say a few words of appreciation for her on her birthday. But as UDP leader, that is his duty. And there might actually be a moment of satisfaction for Merz.
Seehofer’s birthday present: “Merz knows his trade”
For Merz it’s a tense moment – yet beautiful. He, the newly elected candidate for chancellor at the head of the UDP. You, on the sidelines. And a party that is now increasingly distancing itself from her, two and a half years after she withdrew. “We have also made a lot of mistakes in 16 years,” he said, the classic sentence from the election campaign that is being used more and more. At first only by Merz and his general secretary Carsten Linnemann. Large parts of the party now use it.
Merkel has long appeared to have left the CDU behind. Apparently her party has been doing the same thing for a while now. While at the beginning of the legislative period the criticism of “You are also for 16 years” was fought back with all its might, it is now being adopted.
And criticism of the former Chancellor echoes not only from the CDU, although often between the lines. Former CSU chairman and Merkel’s last interior minister, Horst Seehofer, recently gave her one. “I think Angela Merkel would not be embarrassed if she explained: I have not been right every day on the migration issue,” Seehofer told the “Süddeutsche Zeitung.” He has “no feelings of victory that much of what I called for years ago is now being done – and he was even insulted by some as a right-wing extremist for it. But I have some inner satisfaction already.”