Hours after his election victory last Sunday, Friedrich Merz, the leader of Germany’s center-right Christian Democrats (CDU), said on national television that he would try to “achieve independence from the U.S.A. I never thought I would have to say something like this on a television program,” Merz continued, but “it is clear that the Americans … are largely indifferent to the fate of Europe.”

American security guarantees have protected the Federal Republic of Germany since 1945. Never since then has a chancellor of that country suggested that it emancipate itself from Washington. Not even France’s Emmanuel Macron, who has called for building a “sovereign Europe” capable of defending itself since he was first elected in 2017, could have put the imperative in starker terms. So who is the incoming German chancellor making this transformative demand?

Merz is a conservative by any measure—social, fiscal, political—and far from being the avatar of a freethinking new generation in Germany, he may wind up being the last chancellor to hail from the old one. But history has plans for him. He will likely step into the highest office of Europe’s biggest economy and most powerful state just as the United States, under Donald Trump, abandons its post–World War II role on the continent. Merz, with his right-wing instincts and establishment roots, will be guiding his country, maybe even the continent, through a period of epochal change.

Already, Merz has pledged to increase defense spending and put Paris, Warsaw, and London at the lead of a new policy to shore up Ukraine’s sovereignty and defend Europe from Russia with or without the United States. He has even sought to explore whether France and Britain might extend their nuclear umbrella to the rest of Europe, in place of American protection. At any other time, this agenda of European self-reliance might be a radical one. Now it’s a logical response to events.

When he takes office, most likely at the end of April and at the helm of a coalition government with the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), Merz will not be riding a wave of enthusiasm. The CDU won just 28.6 percent of the vote in this election—almost eight points more than the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), and the second-worst showing of the party’s history. And Merz has a personal reputation for being cocky, ambitious, and overly cerebral. He’s a politician with hard edges, and many Germans, especially women, find him hard to like.

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At 6 foot 5, the incoming chancellor literally looks down on most people he talks with. He is also a self-made multimillionaire who describes himself as “upper middle class” yet flies his own private propeller plane. He is a former artilleryman in the Bundeswehr who likes authority and orderliness, and he has a taste for cashmere V-neck sweaters and checkered shirts. Once, when a TV crew was following him for a day, he admonished an employee to brush their hair.

The postwar generation to which Merz belongs has governed Germany for decades. Its men and women were raised amid the country’s immediate moral reckoning with the horrors of the Nazi Reich, and they have made this imperative central to their vision. Merz’s grandfather was a Nazi brownshirt and the mayor of Brilon, a picturesque town in the country’s west where Merz also grew up. Two generations later, Merz has watched the rise of the far-right AfD with profound concern, calling it a “disgrace for Germany.”  

Merz’s life in Brilon was economically comfortable but not always easy or orderly. As a child, he spent six months in a tuberculosis clinic run by nuns—an experience he has dryly described as “not nice at all.” His sister was killed in a car crash at age 21. And he was an impatient and irascible teenager who had to leave his local high school for disciplinary reasons, and whose grades were so bad that he had to repeat a year.

Merz’s political career has been similarly jagged; he has probably survived more defeats than any other living German politician. A former judge, he rose to prominence as a member of Parliament in the 1990s as the standard-bearer for the conservative camp within the CDU. Yet in 2000, Merz lost a bid for party leadership to an unassuming East German named Angela Merkel. Once she became chancellor, Merkel made a point of marginalizing her most threatening rival.

Merz left politics in 2009 to make money—lots of it. He joined a law firm in Düsseldorf and sat on the boards of many big corporations, including prestigious investment firms such as BlackRock Germany, of which he was chair, as well as run-of-the-mill companies such as the toilet-paper producer WEPA. Nine years would pass before he returned to politics. By then, in 2018, Merkel was engulfed in criticism for having let nearly a million refugees into Germany from the Syrian civil war. Within minutes of her announcement that she would step down from the CDU leadership, Merz had a statement ready announcing his candidacy. But the CDU didn’t choose him—at least, not at first. Twice, it picked centrists in the mold of Merkel. But the party kept losing electoral ground. Finally, in 2022, its members saw fit to give Merz a chance to revive the CDU by shifting it to the right.

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Merz favored a politics of law and order and a relatively hard line on immigration. He has at one point even advocated declaring a state of emergency in order to push migrants back from Germany’s borders, something European Union law would otherwise prohibit. Only weeks ago, he passed a parliamentary motion calling for placing undocumented migrants awaiting deportation in closed facilities. This proposal got through only because it won the votes of the AfD. Merz had earlier promised never to work with the far-right party. Now he told critics that if the AfD wanted to vote for his proposal, he could hardly prevent it.

Some of Merz’s rhetoric around immigration sounds a lot like that of the populist right. He once called Ukrainian war refugees “social-welfare tourists”—though he later apologized for it. He has also designated the sons of migrants who fail to respect female schoolteachers “little pashas.” If all this was meant to reduce the AfD’s appeal by moving the CDU to the right, however, it was a failure. His tough talk did not prevent the AfD from capturing almost 21 percent of the vote this year—double what it got in 2021.

Merz’s economic views may be the ones most starkly challenged by the geopolitical moment he finds himself in. To wrest European security from the North American framework will require new investments, new programs, and, almost inevitably, big spending. Merz brings to this task the instincts of a free-marketeer impatient with government outlay and bureaucracy. In the 2000s, he promised that if he became finance minister, he’d make the income-tax form, which in Germany runs to dozens of pages, fit on a beer tap. In 2008, the year of the global financial crisis, Merz published a book arguing that Germany should cut back its welfare state, deregulate its economy, and encourage people to buy more stocks instead of letting their savings languish in bank accounts. Germany’s economy has stagnated for the past five years, and most of Merz’s solutions to that seem to come at the expense of workers or the environment: reducing unemployment benefits, creating incentives for Germans to work longer hours, and rolling back climate regulation. With the auto industry in crisis, he advocates removing the EU ban on internal-combustion-engine cars that is supposed to begin in 2035.

But conservative economic orthodoxies may soon run up against other priorities, some of them every bit as close to Merz’s core. Like most German politicians of the immediate postwar generation, Merz is a Europeanist. He sees the EU not as a constraint but as a conviction. He is an ardent supporter of Ukraine, having criticized his predecessor, Olaf Scholz, for backing Kyiv too timidly and walking in lockstep with President Joe Biden instead of choosing a more assertive course with Paris and London. Scholz once marketed himself as a “peace chancellor,” to which Merz quipped: “Peace you can find in any cemetery. It is our freedom that we must defend.”

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Merz wants Europe to become sovereign and free of foreign interference because he believes that the new administration in Washington, like Moscow, seeks to divide and undermine democracy in Europe. The White House, like the Kremlin, seems intent on intervening in elections on behalf of the far right, and on forcing Brussels to walk back regulations on Big Tech that might curtail disinformation and hate speech. Countering this agenda, when it was only a Russian one, was well in line with conservative German values. On Sunday, the chancellor-in-waiting said: “I have absolutely no illusions about what is happening from America. Just look at the recent interventions in the German election campaign by Mr. Elon Musk … the interventions from Washington were no less dramatic and drastic and ultimately outrageous than the interventions we have seen from Moscow.”

Merz’s conservatism may be what allows him to shepherd Europe through a historic transformation. Just as the anti-communist hard-liner Richard Nixon was uniquely situated to establish American relations with the People’s Republic of China in 1972, and just as the left-wing Chancellor Gerhard Schröder was best placed to cut back Germany’s welfare state in the 2000s, Merz, with his stodgy, center-right credentials and postwar pedigree, may be just the leader to get Germans and Europeans to spend big for their emancipation from the United States.

Germany’s conservative Christian Democrats will enter coalition talks to form a government after winning the most votes.