The Boardroom Chancellor
Friedrich Merz governs like a supervisory board chairman — overseeing, delegating, without a project of his own. An analysis of biography and governing style.
Friedrich Merz governs Germany the way a supervisory board chairman runs a corporation — he oversees, delegates, and monitors, but he does not build. After 20 years in political exile, three failed bids, and a historically humiliating chancellorship vote that required a second ballot, a man occupies the Chancellery who spent his entire political capital on reaching this office but evidently has no idea what to do with it. The connection between his professional habitus as a serial board member and his governing style as an “announcement chancellor” is not a metaphor — it is biography.
Twelve Board Seats and a Private Jet
Friedrich Merz’s career between 2002 and 2020 reads not like the resume of a politician biding his time, but like the portfolio of a professional non-executive director. After losing the parliamentary group leadership to Angela Merkel, he collected board mandates the way others collect stamps: BlackRock Asset Management Germany (supervisory board chairman, 2016–2020, at least €150,000 annual base compensation), HSBC Trinkaus & Burkhardt (board of directors chairman, 2010–2019, approx. €75,000/year), WEPA Industrieholding (supervisory board chairman, 2009–2021), Cologne/Bonn Airport (supervisory board chairman, 2017–2020), Deutsche Börse, AXA Konzern, Stadler Rail, IVG Immobilien, Borussia Dortmund, BASF Antwerp, and various advisory boards at Commerzbank, Ernst & Young, and Robert Bosch. In 2006, he sat on eight supervisory and advisory boards simultaneously — while serving as a member of the Bundestag. When he was appointed supervisory board chairman of Cologne/Bonn Airport in 2017, the state government of North Rhine-Westphalia violated its own ethics code, which limited individuals to two chairmanships.
In parallel, Merz worked as partner, then senior counsel at the international law firm Mayer Brown in Düsseldorf (2005–2021), specializing in M&A, compliance, and banking law. His most lucrative single mandate: the federal government hired him as “divestiture plenipotentiary” for the sale of WestLB — fee: €5,000 per day, nearly two million euros in taxpayer money, for a transaction that ultimately failed. At Stadler Rail’s 2019 IPO, his 150,000 shares were worth €5.7 million.
When Merz stated in 2018 that his annual income was “not less than one million euros gross” and simultaneously described himself as belonging to the “upper middle class,” it became the iconic self-exposure of a man who had evidently lost all connection to the lived reality of ordinary people. His estimated total wealth stands at approximately €12 million. He owns two private aircraft, which he used, among other things, to fly to Christian Lindner’s wedding on the island of Sylt.
The crucial point is not the wealth — it is the professional habitus. A German supervisory board chairman oversees management; he does not lead it. He monitors; he does not create. He appoints and dismisses executives, but he does not run departments. He sets strategic guardrails, but he does not implement strategies. For 18 years, Merz did nothing else.
Chronicle of a Failure Foretold: 2002 to 2025
The story of Friedrich Merz’s path to the Chancellery is a story of repeated failure in which, in the end, he did not win — everyone else simply lost.
2002 — The primal wound. After the CDU donations scandal, Merz assumed the parliamentary group chairmanship in February 2000; Merkel became party chair. The dual leadership lasted two years. At a meeting in Wolfratshausen, Merkel secured CSU leader Stoiber’s support against Merz — in exchange for the chancellor candidacy. After the lost 2002 federal election, Merkel claimed the group chairmanship. There was no contested vote — Merz was simply sidelined. Wolfgang Schäuble commented that Merz had “no experience with defeat.” Merz himself admitted he was “too hurt to continue working under Merkel.” From then on, he referred to her only as “that lady.” In December 2004, he resigned from all leadership positions; in 2009, he left the Bundestag.
2018 — The first comeback attempt. When Merkel relinquished the party chairmanship after 18 years, Merz saw his chance. At the Hamburg party congress on December 7, 2018, he lost to Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer in the runoff, 482 to 517 votes — a margin of just 35. Close enough to maximize the humiliation: Merz had been near enough that failure physically hurt, yet too far to contest the result.
2021 — The second defeat. At the digital party congress in January 2021, Merz actually led in the first round with 385 to 380 votes over Armin Laschet — a five-vote advantage. Then the eliminated Norbert Röttgen’s supporters broke for Laschet, who won the runoff 521 to 466. Merz subsequently tried to at least take over Peter Altmaier’s economics ministry. Merkel’s response from the Chancellery: “Is over.”
2022 — Victory by exhaustion. Only after Laschet’s catastrophic election defeat (CDU/CSU: 24.1%, a historic low) and the withdrawal of all serious competitors did Merz win the party chairmanship with 62.1% in a membership ballot — against the lightweights Norbert Röttgen and Helge Braun. It was not a new beginning; it was a funeral. Merz inherited the party because no one serious was left to run.
2025 — Chancellor on the second try, literally. NRW Minister-President Hendrik Wüst declined to run; Markus Söder declared on September 17, 2024 in Berlin: “The chancellor question is settled. Friedrich Merz will do it!” The CDU/CSU won the snap federal election on February 23, 2025 with a meager 28.5% — only 4.4 points above their historic low. And then, on May 6, 2025, came the moment that symbolically distilled Merz’s entire career: in the first ballot for chancellor, he received only 310 of the 316 required votes — 18 members of his own coalition refused him their support. It was the first time in the history of the Federal Republic that a designated chancellor failed in the first ballot after successful coalition negotiations. Angela Merkel sat as an honored guest in the gallery. Only in the second ballot, that afternoon, was Merz elected with 325 votes. Political scientist Karl-Rudolf Korte concluded: “The opportunities for him to arrive with something like the magic of a new beginning — those have evaporated.”
The Foreign Policy Chancellor Who Treats Domestic Policy as a Chore
As chancellor, Merz reproduces exactly the behavioral pattern of a supervisory board chairman: he concentrates on the “strategic level” — foreign policy, EU summits, NATO, transatlantic relations — and delegates operational domestic policy to his ministers, much as a supervisory board lets the executive board do its work. Albrecht von Lucke diagnosed in Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik in July 2025: Merz wanted to be a “foreign policy chancellor,” “while domestic policy would be left to his Dobrindts and Freis.” ZDFheute analyzed in October 2025: “Merz remains the foreign policy chancellor. The grand themes lend him significance on the European stage, but they simultaneously rob him of space for domestic leadership.” Merz himself called the label “foreign policy chancellor” at the CDU party congress in February 2026 “a compliment” — thus inadvertently confirming the diagnosis.
His personnel decisions follow the same logic. Instead of experienced politicians, Merz appointed corporate managers to the cabinet, as though he were staffing a corporate board. Karsten Wildberger, formerly CEO of Ceconomy (MediaMarktSaturn) on an annual salary of €2.8 million, became Germany’s first Federal Minister for Digital Affairs — a non-partisan manager who had directly succeeded Merz as vice president of the CDU’s Economic Council. Wildberger himself captured the irony: “I have one advantage — I don’t come from politics. And I have one disadvantage — I don’t come from politics.” Katherina Reiche, formerly CEO of E.ON subsidiary Westenergie, became Economics Minister — a classic revolving-door appointment, with LobbyControl noting that Reiche was still listed as a lobbyist in the transparency register on the morning of her swearing-in. Publisher Wolfram Weimer (founder of Cicero, former editor-in-chief of Die Welt and Focus) became Minister of State for Culture. More than half the cabinet had zero government experience — including Merz himself, who had never been mayor, county commissioner, state secretary, or minister-president. Christoph Schwennicke, politics editor at t-online, summed it up: “A government of amateurs and novices."
"Announcement Chancellor”: The Reforms That Never Came
The most telling evidence for Merz’s governing style comes from the man himself. In the summer of 2025, he announced a grand “Autumn of Reforms” — tax reform, deregulation, an economic turnaround. What came? The reforms were outsourced to commissions, those favorite instruments of supervisory board members who want to defer decisions without admitting it. ZDFheute concluded: “The autumn of reforms: a washout.” FDP leader Christian Dürr spoke of a “winter of disappointment.” When the substitute “spring of reforms” also failed to materialize, the pattern was unmistakable.
Albrecht von Lucke delivered the verdict on ZDF’s morning show on December 22, 2025: “Then he is ultimately an announcement chancellor who fails to deliver on his promises.” Von Lucke identified a fundamental pattern: “He always makes the same mistake: he sets expectations too high and cannot deliver on what he has promised.” The political scientist went further: Merz was “not a great power strategist” and “unpracticed in the exercise of power” — he stood “not at all in the tradition of Adenauer, Kohl, and Merkel,” who could forge alliances and keep the party in line. His policy statements were also criticized as lacking substance — Publikum.net noted “the same phrases as always” and “statesmanlike platitudes that everyone knows will have no political consequences.” Green parliamentary leader Dröge concluded in the Bundestag: “A government without leadership cannot function.”
In the biggest crisis of his chancellorship so far — the US-Israeli military strikes against Iran beginning February 2026 — Merz reacted passively and commentatively, not proactively: he convened the National Security Council, initially avoided any criticism of Washington, later offered vague minesweeping assistance in the Strait of Hormuz, and himself conceded this was “rather theoretical.” No German initiative, no independent strategy — only observation and commentary, exactly the behavior of a supervisory board watching management work.
The numbers reflect the public’s verdict: by October 2025, 71% of Germans were dissatisfied with the chancellor. The coalition parties polled at a combined 37% — eight points below their already meager election result. The Neue Zürcher Zeitung noted: “After just a few months in office, Merz finds himself where his Social Democratic predecessor Olaf Scholz only arrived after years: he has become a liability for state election campaigns.”
The Demons of Friedrich Merz: Revenge Without a Program
The psychological dimension of the Merz chancellorship has been extensively documented by the media. Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik ran the headline “Merz’s Revenge” as early as January 2024, quoting: “Merkel always sensed: Friedrich Merz’s revenge would be cruel.” Switzerland’s Blick analyzed: for Merz, the chancellor candidacy was “first and foremost the ultimate revenge on his political arch-enemy Merkel.” Der Spiegel devoted a May 2024 cover story to him — “The Demons of Friedrich Merz: The CDU Leader and His Most Dangerous Opponent: Himself” — in which anonymous staffers described him as “hot-tempered and at times uncontrolled.” Stern headlined: “Friedrich the False.”
What is missing is the project after the revenge. Franz Müntefering (SPD) put it succinctly: “He was never a mayor, county commissioner, or minister-president. Kohl and Merkel never brought him into their cabinets — they knew him.” The NZZ stated in December 2025: “Merz has so far found no political narrative that reconciles the chancellorship with party leadership.” Gabor Steingart called him the “snapping chancellor” after the ZDF summer interview — Merz grew irritable at the very first question and lectured the journalist: “I suspect you — just like many viewers — don’t even know what that is.” The broadcast revealed, Steingart wrote, “the demons of Friedrich Merz: the chancellor was not gracious, but grim.”
Tichys Einblick, from the right, delivered the sharpest psychological diagnosis: Merz was “a deeply vain politician who regards approval not as a gift from voters but as tribute owed to him. When that love fails to materialize, his attitude does not tip into self-examination but into personal grievance.” Foreign Policy headlined in December 2025: “Germany Loves to Hate Friedrich Merz” and observed: “Almost nobody that I talk to has ever had a good word to say about him.”
From Satire to Portrait: Merz as Cultural Phenomenon
The satirical processing of the chancellorship ranges from precision scalpel to wrecking ball. ZDF’s heute-show dubbed Merz “The Intern in the Chancellery” and publicly complained that the CDU had denied the show’s team accreditation for weeks. Jan Böhmermann opened an art exhibition at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt in September 2025 featuring three large-format paintings of a nearly nude Merz within sight of the Chancellery. The TITANIC editorial team published a satirical “autobiography” — “Finally Chancellor! The Definitive Autobiography of Friedrich Merz” (Satyr Verlag, September 2025) — with the subtitle: “The story of a simple boy from Brilon who never stopped dreaming because he never started.” Martin Sonneborn’s satirical party Die PARTEI plastered Berlin with “Black Rock Matters” posters in CDU design and forced the broadcast of a campaign ad by court order, referencing Merz’s 1997 vote against criminalizing marital rape.
On TikTok and Instagram, Merz became a viral meme: in adaptations of the “Dubai — Aren’t you afraid?” format, young users replaced heroic leaders with footage of the chancellor stumbling, dropping a cake plate, and typing on a laptop “in boomer fashion” — the portrait of a generation that does not trust this chancellor.
Three books document the phenomenon: Volker Resing’s authorized biography “Friedrich Merz: His Path to Power” (Herder), Mariam Lau’s analytical panorama “Merz — In Search of the Lost Center” (Ullstein, 2025), and Sara Sievert’s “The Inevitable.” The labels circulating in the quality press tell the whole story: “chancellor of the second choice” (Tichys Einblick — with the double meaning of the second ballot), “chancellor of the mournful countenance” (a Don Quixote reference), “chancellor without luster” (NZZ: “Merz’s less-than-one-year-old chancellorship simply cannot generate any luster”).
A Board Chairman in the Wrong Building
The connection between Merz’s biography and his governing style is structural, not anecdotal. For 18 years, the man professionally did what a supervisory board chairman does: he appointed and evaluated executives, set strategic guardrails, reviewed quarterly reports, and kept out of operations. That is exactly how he governs. He staffs his cabinet with managers instead of politicians, focuses on “strategic” foreign policy, delegates domestic “operations” to Dobrindt and Frei, announces reform programs the way a board signs off on quarterly targets — and is surprised when no one implements them.
The problem is not that Merz would make a bad supervisory board chairman. The problem is that a federal chancellor is not a supervisory board chairman. A chancellor must lead, not oversee. He must have a narrative that extends beyond quarterly results. He must forge alliances, not award consulting contracts. The irony is perfect: Merz waited 20 years for this office, survived three defeats and a historic humiliation — and brings as his only project the absence of a project. TITANIC captured it in a sentence that could serve as the epitaph for this chancellorship: the story of a man “who never stopped dreaming because he never started.”
Why This Is Here
This blog is called Building Anyway. The core idea: building beats waiting. Starting beats arriving. And the attempt to create something — however unfinished, however small — is worth more than twenty years of preparation for the perfect moment.
Friedrich Merz waited twenty years for the perfect moment. He got it. And then he stood there — without a blueprint, without a project, without any idea of what this office could be beyond the end of a long wait. He mistook arriving for beginning.
This is not a partisan observation. It is a human one. Anyone who works only toward arriving somewhere has nothing left to say once they get there. The more interesting stories are written by those who build along the way — even when the result is imperfect, even when nobody is watching.
If you’re curious about where that conviction comes from, I’d recommend the first article on this blog. On Tom Scott, vibe coding, and the question of why you make things even when the conditions aren’t right.
This is part 1 of the six-part series “One Year of Chancellor Merz” — every Wednesday on Building Anyway.