Friedrich Merz: enthusiasm or overzealousness?

Friedrich Merz starts off as if he had already been elected Chancellor. With refreshing enthusiasm on the one hand, but a strange understanding of politics on the other.

As a little boy I loved this simple children's toy, a kind of magic board - I don't even know if they still exist. It was a penny item made of cardboard and foil, with a plastic stick that you could use to write something on the foil, which would then become visible. If you pulled out the inside using a tab on the right and pushed it back again, what you had written would disappear. And the game could start again from the beginning.

In German politics, the tab is being pulled. Names that we had become accustomed to over the years, people who were part of the core staff of the political establishment, have suddenly disappeared like writing on a magic blackboard. Robert Habeck , my God, how devotedly our profession has been to the question of what was going on behind his brow, which was furrowed with deep worry lines, and what the tentative and thoughtful words that he delivered in his always slightly hoarse voice ultimately meant. All of a sudden: gone. And with it the end of an entire branch of science, Habeckology.

Others, like the SPD leader Saskia Esken , who has always been unsuccessful, are still resisting having their names removed from the board. But that will be sorted out. Snap. Name gone. It is now a face change and a name change in German politics. I am already looking forward to the first few days and moments of brief irritation when the newsreader on the radio in the morning talks about "Chancellor Friedrich Merz" who will do this or that today. It always feels so fresh. It was the same with Olaf Scholz after 16 years of Merkel.

The aforementioned Friedrich Merz is already pressing the plastic stick so deeply into the magic tablet that the result looks more like an engraving than a lettering. "Chancellor" is written there even before his election in the plenary session of the Bundestag. This prematurity is a pattern with Merz: Even as a possible candidate of the Union, he acted as a candidate for chancellor, and as a candidate for chancellor, he acted as chancellor. Even more so now, after his, well, relative election victory. He is actually already chancellor, made his first government statement on Monday of this week at a press conference in the atrium of the Konrad Adenauer House, questioned the still very new electoral law after its premiere and announced that he would definitely like to use the remnants of the traffic light coalition to pass a special fund for the Bundeswehr in the Bundestag during this hybrid phase of the transition from old to new. At first it even sounded like a reform of the debt brake.

At the CDU headquarters, they are still clearing the building blocks from the atrium, which even his closest party friends were amazed by when he heard these words. It is not just this appearance that raises the question: does this man, and hopefully the next Chancellor, know how politics works?

You have to let that sink in and sort it out. So: The man who just called the demonstrating supporters of the red and green parties "left-wing weirdos", who had his migration applications approved by the AfD in the Bundestag, much to their disgust, is writing a letter to the still-serving Chancellor, asking him to please do nothing more without him, Merz, countersigning it in a way. And on the other hand, at the same time, because all the windows for this in the new Bundestag are closing for the entire legislative period due to the blocking minority of the AfD and the Left, he is demanding that the red and green parties agree with him on what he has always refused them: not just anything, but the central issue that will determine the ability of the past government to act as well as his own next one: additional money. Because he knows full well that no matter how much he searches the welfare state for untimely blessings, he will never find as much money in these corners as the reaction to the world's turn to existential danger requires.