Friedrich Mertz (69), old-fashioned conservative, multi-millionaire, owner of at least one plane he pilots himself, the man he is Angela Merkel once cleaned out of the party and politics, he waited for his five minutes.
Unless something completely unforeseen happens, the head of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) will become chancellor earlier than he had hoped, already sometime in March or April.
The polls see a clear winner
This has been Merz's dream since the beginning of the 2000s when former Chancellor Angela Merkel pushed him out of the position of the head of the parliamentary group of the then opposition Christian Democrats.
Merkel - coldly and boringly - writes about this in her memoir "Freedom", stating simply that both she and Mertz wanted to be number one.
But Merc did not have a bad life. He worked, for example, for the American investment fund BlackRock and made good money.
This week (February 23), his party won the German elections with about 29 percent of the vote, according to exit polls. There can be no government without him, and it can only be with him if he is chancellor.
His likely partner will be the Social Democrats, who experienced a historic fiasco in the elections.
For the Social Democrats, the role of the junior partner would be a return to the "black widow's embrace" as they were during three of Angela Merkel's four mandates when they were only losing their importance.
What does that Merc want?
Be that as it may, it did not cost Merco dearly that he proposed laws to tighten the migration policy at the end of the campaign in the Bundestag, knowing that he could pass them only with the votes of the right-wing Alternative for Germany.
After that, mass protests broke out across Germany. In the end, Merc may not have profited from this topic, but he hasn't lost any percentages on it either.
He promises blood, tears and sweat, coldly says that there is not enough money in the budget for everything, that the state collects enough taxes, but spends excessively.
He phones Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and promises more German ammunition, including Taurus missiles with a range of over five hundred kilometers. Scholz refuses to deliver them because he is afraid of targeting the territory of the Russian Federation.
Mertz will toughen policies on migrants and asylum seekers, advocating turning most away at borders because they have little chance of getting protection. The new law that enables dual citizenship is also a thorn in his side - he announced its repeal.
Mertz will do anything to be anti-Merkel. He always believed that the former chancellor dragged the Christian Democrats too far to the center, even to the left, and that a more conservative policy was needed.
But maybe Mertz will see that today's Germany is not easy to manage. In the wake of divisions, wars and crises, the question is not when the economic hiccups will pass, but whether decades of prosperity have come to an end. And does the world in which he entered politics and became rich still exist?
