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Month: May 2025

Friedrich Merz Finally Gets to Be Chancellor

Merz has dreamt of this since the 1990s, potentially a nightmare for the rest of us


07/05/2025

Friedrich Merz laughing at something off-camera.

It was actually a series of scandals in the 1990s that allowed for Friedrich Merz’s quick rise to political prominence. Following several corruption scandals that rocked the leadership of the CDU and stripped it of the popular support it needed to continue governing, the party fell to the SPD in the 1998 elections. While a major setback for the party, the resulting clearing of ranks created the conditions which allowed for the rise of two young and ambitious CDU politicians who had kept their images clean and whose careers would become thoroughly intertwined: Merz and Angela Merkel.

Joachim-Friedrich Martin Josef Merz was born in 1955 in Brilon, North Rhine-Westphalia in a stately Catholic family home––now protected by denkmalschutz (laws protecting historical monuments). His mother was from the local noble Sauvigny family, of French origin. His father was a judge and a member of the CDU. It was probably no great shock to the family when Merz Jr. decided to join the CDU himself in 1972, and then studied law.

After finishing his studies and a brief spell working as a corporate lawyer, he was able to make politics his full time job. At 34 he ran for and won a seat in the European parliament in 1989. In the 1994 Bundestag elections, the CDU and its leader Helmut Kohl narrowly maintained their role running Germany and the young Merz won his first seat in the Bundestag as part of the ruling coalition. Already in these early days he showed ambition, with an eye on rising through the ranks of the party.

By the next election, the CDU’s position had changed drastically, with the old guard stepping away and Merkel and Merz becoming figures of renewal. By the year 2000, Merkel led the party structures and Merz the Bundestag faction, acting as co-leaders of the party. While Merkel represented the Christian liberal wing of the party, Merz stood for the neoliberal and socially conservative right wing. The two did not get along particularly well, and as the successfully rehabilitated CDU prepared for the 2002 election it was clear there would be a fight over who ran as chancellor, a position both Merkel and Merz coveted.

In a moment that would change the trajectory of Merz’s life, Merkel bested him, slipping away to the so-called Wolfrathauser Frühstuck hosted by the leader of the CDU’s Bavarian sister party, the CSU. Here, she secured the candidacy to run for chancellor.

Merkel won the election and decided not to give her former co-leader a ministerial post. The message was clear. In 2004, Merz retired as head of the faction, effectively conceding defeat. In 2009, he decided not to run for parliament at all, choosing to return to the private sector once his leadership ambitions were squashed.

Merz’s Time in the Private Sector

Merz’s experience in the German government and as a corporate lawyer, not to mention his political connections, would prove highly lucrative. In the mid-2000s, he took his promotion of capitalism outside of the Bundestag and into the private sphere, while accepting a long list of advantageous corporate positions. In 2008 he published a book, Mehr Kapitalismus wagen (roughly translating to ‘dare to do more capitalism’) pushing for further neoliberalism. At the time, he was asked by a Der Spiegel reporter how he felt about the timing of writing a full-throated defense of capitalism while many blamed capitalism for the recent financial crisis. In his confident, bulldozer style, he responded simply that he “couldn’t have wished for a better timing.”

A recent report by the investigative journalism outfit CORRECTIV highlights his close industry ties throughout his time in the private sector. His main connection was to the legal firm Mayer Brown, where he worked for 16 years. Through this experience, as well as other advisory boards, Merz developed a particularly close relationship with the metal and chemical industries––even lobbying for the latter in Brussels. The metal industry naturally brought him closer to the auto industry. While at Mayer Brown, he worked closely with the chemical corporation BASF (for which he was also a senior consultant at one point). BASF is the largest corporate user of water in Germany, an increasingly important topic in the country as regions like Brandenberg have their groundwater sucked dry by corporations in the name of profits.

This was far from his only controversial position. Merz also worked for the notorious BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world, known for investing in all kinds of exploitative businesses. Drawing on his experience in EU and German parliaments, he was responsible for maintaining relationships with governments and government offices on behalf of BlackRock Germany. Journalists point out that Merz was also working with three different financial institutions which have faced allegations in the Cum-ex tax fraud scandal, when various traders and banks stole billions of euros which should have gone into government coffers. His role in relation to the scandal is still unclear.

All in all, as CORRECTIV lays out, Merz has sat on advisory or administrative boards for BASF, Bayer AG (another chemical company), AXA Insurance, DBV Insurance, Commerzbank, HSBC, BlackRock and more. He also chaired the Atlantik-Brücke for ten years, an important German political organisation which fosters a strong relationship between Germany and the USA, supporting the American-led global order. Through holding these various positions, Merz has become a millionaire, mostly while lobbying for better conditions for corporations. Now with Merz as Chancellor, he’ll push the same positions he was once paid for, except now at no cost to his former employers.

Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud

Incredibly, for Merz’s critics, his corporate connections and relationship to various economic scandals often take a backseat compared to his blasé comments. Merz regularly makes it into the news for saying something cringe, outright racist, and/or sexist. He is notorious for these throwaway comments, and, while the list could go on forever, reviewing some of his scandals helps give an insight as to who the man is.

Back in 2001, when then candidate for Berlin mayor Klaus Wowereit came out as gay during the local election, Merz reacted by saying that “so long as he doesn’t come near me, it doesn’t matter.” In 2021, as Merz was regularly being associated with misogyny, he took to Twitter to tell the world that “if I really had a ‘woman problem’, as some say, then my daughter would have given me the yellow card a long time ago, and my wife wouldn’t have married me 40 years ago.” Even the Berliner Zeitung called it a “shitstorm.”

In 2004, the fact that his hometown was run by an SPD mayor bothered him so much he called for a storming of the city hall. As an example of proper governance, he referred to the years when his maternal grandfather Josef Paul Sauvigny was mayor for the rightwing catholic Zentrumspartei. This caused backlash since Herr Sauvigny served from 1917 until his retirement in 1937, overlapping with the rise of the Nazi party. Around a week after his comments, Merz was forced to release a statement admitting that his grandfather had actually joined the NSDAP in 1933, as it became clear that the Taz had been digging around in archives and were about to release the information themselves.

On a televised program in 2023 he called the children of migrants “little Pashas,” referring to how (assumedly brown) children whose parents were unwilling to assimilate were supposedly terrorising school teachers. The poor, “mostly female” teachers who dealt with these children were used as a justification for his pro-deportation stance. Later that same year at the Bavarian festival Gillamoos, he stated “Kreuzberg isn’t Germany, Gillamoos is Germany.” Partially a jab at the diverse and left-leaning population of the Berlin district, Merz’s comment also demonstrates his disdain for the urban parts of the country.

Merz also provoked controversy for his justification of why he would not implement gender parity in his cabinet. A candidate who had been accused of having a ‘woman problem’ might be expected to handle the subject carefully, but Merz handled it in his characteristic blunt manner. Pointing to the brief tenure of the SPD’s Christine Lambrecht as defense minister, he argued that with such a “blatant miscasting” as this, “we are not doing women any favours either.”

Particularly impressive is that he has managed to create so many embarrassing sound bites, even before becoming the most important politician in the country. With all cameras now pointed at him, who knows what he’ll come up with next.

Return to Politics and Becoming Chancellor

In 2018, Merz finally got his chance for a triumphal return. Having stayed out of politics for as long as the top job was held by Merkel, he jumped back into politics––although he wasn’t so quick to step down from all his corporate positions; he was at BlackRock until 2020.

Merz immediately ran to lead the party, which would have given him a relatively secure chance of being the party candidate for chancellor in the upcoming election. He narrowly lost in two consecutive elections, a possible sign of how divisive a figure Merz is within his own party.

Following the election defeat to what would eventually become Olaf Scholz’s government, Merz, nothing if not stubborn in his belief in himself, ran once again in December that same year. This time, he finally achieved the position he had first vied for in 2000: undisputed leader of the CDU. His path was clear to run for chancellorship and, after Scholz’s disastrous turn in government, Merz breezed through an easy election to become chancellor of Germany.

In many senses, Merz is better suited to have ruled in the early 2000’s than now. It is easy to imagine the Atlanticist, neoliberal Merz sitting alongside Tony Blair, George Bush, and Stephen Harper, all wearing expensive suits, discussing the latest free trade agreement, and comparing who has the biggest austerity measures. 

That period was marked by an unshakeable confidence in the capitalism and neoliberalism ushered in by the West’s triumph over the Soviet Union. Political confidence swelled among the ruling classes, both in themselves and in their ideologies. Merz’s politics harken back to this triumphal capitalism before the 2008 market crash; the time when political leaders declared illegal wars on vaguely-defined threats, and got away with it. He is a product of that era, with its leaders whose economic policies led to the 2008 financial crisis and whose continued austerity failed to reverse the impacts of that crisis, until their power began to slip into the hands of figures like Donald Trump and Nigel Farage.

Now in Germany, the task of preventing a far-right ascendance, with the AfD on the verge of power, rests on Merz’s shoulders. While his economic policies are better suited to fostering a political crisis than resolving one, he has also already shown himself to be willing to play into the AfD’s hand if it advances his own interests and goals. In January this year, shortly before the elections, he broke the so-called ‘fire-wall’ against the AfD from mainstream political parties, relying on the party’s support to try and pass migration reforms in the Bundestag. The AfD’s leader called it “a historic day for Germany.”
Even in the time between winning the election and becoming chancellor his popularity had already begun to sink, perhaps the result of having won primarily due to the unpopularity of his main opponents. His own unpopularity was highlighted when he required two Bundestag votes yesterday to become chancellor, despite having already agreed on a coalition with the SPD. But Merz is likely to hold onto his position for as long as he can. Looking back over a career already full of more memorable throwaway comments than it’s possible to remember, it’s his ambition that seems to stand out the most, and which seems most likely to define his rule. Germany should beware the authoritarianism of the opportunist who, having fought so long and hard to get to power, will fight to retain it.

You’re Not My Daddy, Jorge Mario Bergoglio!

A pious letter from a San Francisco demigod to the chieftain of pedophiles at St. Peter’s Basilica


05/05/2025

Background 

Reuters, March 1, 2024:

“Pope Francis on Friday warned of the dangers of so-called gender theory, saying he had commissioned studies into what he condemned as an ‘ugly ideology’ that threatens humanity.” 

‘‘I have asked that studies be carried out into this ugly ideology of our times, which cancels out the differences [between men and women] and makes everything the same.’’—Pope Francis

CNN, April 8, 2024:

‘‘The Vatican has issued a strong warning against ‘gender theory’ and said that any ‘sex-change intervention’ risks threatening ‘the unique dignity’ of a person, in a new document [titled “Dignitas Infinita” ] signed off and approved by Pope Francis.

The Letter

Dear Dead Pope,

It has been known widely and painfully throughout centuries and continents that punching down and virtue signaling are integral parts of the Catholic church’s teachings, actions and history. This explains why a house of certified slavers, murderers, con artists, fascist collaborators, misogynists and above all pedophiles still stand in the most precious real estate south of Florence.

Your for-profit institution promoted slavery as the will of the “Almighty” to promote your God of murder and mayhem with the sole purpose of funding your predecessors’ orgies and payments to brilliant Dutch and Italian artists, jewelers and architects. What have you done about that, oh most “generous” Francis? Have you given back the billions your institution stole of the Native peoples of Amazon, Mexico, Peru and Bolivia? Have you compensated Jamaica and Haiti for your centuries of slavery? Have you opened your mouth except to tickle your vapid ego or to dehumanize trans people who are facing murderous hate from family and governments alike? 

I’d like to quote Martin Luther’s words for another leader of the un-Holy See who was also white but had a habit of fucking adult women instead of young boys, as written in his essay, ‘Against the Roman Papacy, an Institution of the Devil’: “Gently, dear Pauli, dear donkey, don’t dance around! Oh, dearest little ass, don’t dance around—dearest, dearest little donkey, don’t do it. For the ice is very solidly frozen this year because there was no wind —you might fall and break a leg. If a fart should escape you while you were falling, the whole world would laugh at you and say, ‘Ugh, the devil! How the ass has befouled himself!’ And that would be a great crime. Oh, that would be dangerous! So consider your own great danger beforehand, Hellish One.” 

Dear Francis, now that you are dead and playing chess with Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who is going to be the refuge of pedophiles from Warsaw to Aachen to Dublin to Boston to Buenes Aires? That was a rhetorical question, you hypocrite, dead fuck. 

That you and your followers believe that attacking transgender people—who are the embodiment of a hot Christ—is the right thing to do in the age of AI and the refugee crisis across continents and right outside of your castles is why oceans are dying, why temperatures are rising, why fascist parties are popping up across Europe, and popular fascists are ruling Northern and Southern America and, above all, why pedophiles thrive and continue to thrive in your schools, buildings and offices across the globe. Here’s another fiery nugget from that  16th century German country boy: 

“A natural donkey, which carries sacks to the mill and eats thistles, can judge you—indeed, all creatures can! For a donkey knows it is a donkey and not a cow. A stone knows it is a stone; water is water, and so on through all the creatures. But you mad asses do not know you are asses.”

Dear dead ‘n bloated but expensive Francis:

While you were suffering in the best hospitals that amassed profits of slave trade and stolen precious metals could buy, while you were struggling to overcome the constipation of dying, your institution of “the Devil” softened its stance on trans people?!

CNN, Mar 5, 2025: ‘‘Vatican clarifies its position on gender affirming surgery, calling for ‘greater care’ and a case-by-case approach.’’

So while you were staying in the hospital, far from your throne, servants, gold, silk, organic breakfast and imported mineral water, your church is softening its stance on trans people seeking to not kill themselves to only exist? HA!

I will tell you what I told you last year. Actually, I never said it, and now you are dead. Well, I have one last gem of Martin Luther’s for your vapid existence:


“I can with good conscience consider you a fart-ass and an enemy of God.”

April 21, 2025

Tenderloin, San Francisco

Revolutionary 1st May demonstration 2025

Berlin Neukölln, 1 May 2025


04/05/2025

Photo Gallery – The Left Berlin at the 1 May 2025 Festival

Mariannenplatz, in front of the Bethanien Building


“There’s A Lot Of Rage We All Feel, But More Than That, I Feel Love And Concern For My Friends”

Anam Raheem and Matt Davis call on our collective empathy to raise funds for Palestinians.


03/05/2025

Gaza Champions is a mutual aid network founded by Anam Raheem and Matt Davis that places people in direct contact with families in need of support in Gaza, allowing them to directly fundraise for those hit hardest by the war. The champions are also pen pals with their families in Gaza, learning about their lives and experiences, building morale and helping them to better tell their stories. In times of staunch political division and polarization, Gaza Champions manages to cut through, and in its own way, enables people across the world to make small, albeit concrete contributions to the lives of people, who they now have meaningful relationships with. The Left Berlin spoke to Anam and Matt to learn more about the organization.

TLB: Can you tell us about your connection to Gaza?

Anam Raheem: Both Matt and I worked for Mercy Corps, which is an American international humanitarian aid organization. Specifically, we were working for a program called Gaza Sky Geeks, a Google-backed tech hub in Gaza City. The idea was to connect the youth in Gaza to the outside world, to earn dignified incomes by participating in the global tech industry. It wasn’t a typical NGO job where we were in an office and would have field visits. Instead, we were based in a community center in Gaza. We would have hundreds of people come through our doors every day, and so, we developed very close relationships with the people in Gaza, irrespective of whether they were our team members or people who participated in our program.

TLB: When was this roughly?

AR: So I was there from 2017 to 2021, and Matt left just before October 7 2023. 

TLB: And it was after that that when you started thinking about Gaza Champions, right?

AR: Yeah, so it started about a year ago. As I’m sure you know, all these GoFundMes started coming out of Gaza. And because Matt and I both have a huge network in Gaza, many GoFundMes started coming our way. At first, I was just using my Instagram page to share GoFundMes, to try and tell the story of this or that person, and mobilize my small network to contribute. But very quickly it became overwhelming– with hundreds of GoFundMes it wasn’t effective to just fill my Instagram with these stories. 

I have a friend in DC and she sort of naturally connected with some of my friends from Gaza on Instagram, and formed a pen pal relationship with one of them, and started promoting her GoFundMe, saying “This is this person, this is what I’ve learnt about them – let’s support them!” And that planted the seed for me– this one to one relationship where someone is just telling the story of someone in Gaza in a very human way, and using their platform to mobilize funds for them. At the time the border was open, so there was hope for their evacuation, but these days, with the border closed, people still need to survive day-to-day life, the cost of which is severely inflated during wartime. 

I started out by simply writing a call for volunteers in the notes app on my phone and posting a screenshot of it on Instagram. That post went pretty far, I think the first wave was about 60 people. And then I told Matt about this idea and we created a spreadsheet to have a mechanism to start matching the GoFundMes we have with people who are volunteering. And that’s how Gaza Champions was born. 

MD: For the first six months of the genocide, we were in shock, like everyone else. We were doing what we could, posting and so on, but by February or March it had gotten to the point where everyone in Gaza had run out of money and needed help, so it was a way of dealing with that feeling of wanting to share stuff my friends were sending me, but knowing that that wasn’t going to help.

TLB: So it sounds like the pen pal connection was part of it from the beginning.

AR: Yeah, the idea was that it wouldn’t be this anonymous thing, and that you would be in direct contact with someone, supporting them. I think what’s really effective, is being able to tell a story over time– this is a person I know in Gaza, this is what they went through this month, and from our fundraising, they were able to get a tent, for example. Some champions FaceTime with their person in Gaza with their whole family, so the whole family rallies around them and checks in on them and wants to know how they’re doing. It’s flourished beyond what I could have even hoped for. 

TLB: There’s also a kind of accountability that comes through that as well – there’s a degree of responsibility that you feel as the connection with your family grows. 

MD: It’s not even accountability, it just makes it feel more real. That’s the amazing way in which it has bloomed. When we worked at Sky Geeks there were about 40 people in the office, and some of them were super close friends, while others I would chat with but I wouldn’t still be close with them. But they’ve connected with some of my friends in England and now they’re really close friends, better than I ever knew them in person. So it’s that human element.

AR: Yeah, the thing that’s really motivating is friendship, right? If the world has turned on your friends you would do whatever you could to help them. And I think that is what keeps me sane, because there’s a lot of rage we all feel, but more than that rage, I feel love and concern for my friends. It’s also a great way of bringing people into the cause. You’re not just fighting for this abstract “Free Palestine” concept, you have someone in Gaza to help get through this. It keeps people motivated and helps not to burn out or give up.

TLB: Do you have any way of measuring the impact? Do you know how much you’ve raised across all of the different Champions?

MD: The short answer is we have no idea. At one point I was trying to track it a little bit, by looking on GoFundMe how much money had been raised before and after we connected people. But it’s hard to track because there’s no public API for GoFundMe, so getting the data is really hard. 

AR: Yeah, we are doing this in a totally voluntary capacity. We know that we have 150-ish champions in 13 countries. In terms of impact, we have some beautiful anecdotal evidence– some people that were able to evacuate directly, and others who have had months of groceries covered because of their champions. But, yes, we don’t have a dollar figure estimate because we just don’t have the capacity. 

TLB: Have you had any political opposition or pushback to the project?


AR: Well, generally speaking, it has been pretty insulated from the pushback and hate. I think that’s primarily because this is mutual aid, not protest or direct advocacy, keeping it very human to human. Especially compared to all the other kinds of actions and demonstrations and how charged things can get, Gaza Champions is like, warm and fuzzy. 

There was one champion who reached out to me to say “Someone in my network googled the person I’m championing and found tweets around October 7, celebrating this act of resistance, so I don’t know if I can champion this person anymore.” I then reasoned with them, that while it was up to them to champion or not, I would call into question the motives of someone who put in their time and effort to look up someone enduring genocide, to find a reason not to support their humanity or support their survival.

It brings in the perfect-victim framework that Mohammed el-Kurd puts into context in his book, Perfect Victims. We need Palestinians to be ideologically pure, according to Western standards, to be worthy of our care and support. This is just one instance, but that person has continued to be a champion, and it shows how this can expand people’s political education around Palestine, because you’re not just thinking of it as an abstract cause, these are living, breathing humans. 

Violence sucks, but we can understand that if someone is living under oppression, they have seen so much death, so much loss, and so much loss of opportunity. So if they see this as the first punch thrown against their oppressors, I can understand why someone might look at that day and feel a certain way, feel a certain catharsis. And it goes beyond that. You get to understand Islam through them, you get to witness Ramadan through them. So this is a really beautiful form of political education, that’s very practical, and isn’t in the form of demonstration or protest.

Something else that comes up a lot, is people wanting to know if these are verified campaigns. And it’s tricky, because it’s verified in the way that mutual aid is just a network, right? We know a lot of these people directly, but we also don’t know some of them. It’s just all word of mouth. So our rule is that it’s either someone we know directly or it’s being referred to by someone we trust– that’s the extent of our verification. On top of that, a lot of people want to be donating to a registered non-profit with a 501(c)(3) status– things that have, like, a Western stamp of approval. So Gaza Champions is about shifting how we think about aid in Palestine, or in a war-torn region, by going directly to people in a mutual aid format, as opposed to having our resources gate kept by big organizations. 

MD: Anam and I were both working at a major NGO where we had to deal with a lot of red tape, and our hands were tied in a lot of situations, so being able to just do this has been very freeing. I love that there’s this moment where we connect people, and just say “Okay, you guys go do it.” When people are first connected, there might be some uncertainty, but as the relationship builds, it resolves the issue of verification– I don’t think that any of our champions would ever be questioning the people they are raising money for. And sure, we have more families who need help than champions at the moment, so you see why the red tape developed, because we just have to randomly pick cases. But it can also be a barrier, when you have to tell people you can’t help them because they don’t meet a certain set of criteria. 

Going in, we had no idea of what it was going to become. I don’t think at any point did we expect it to get this big. And this has been a group learning experience, where one champion does one thing, and then they share that with others. This natural evolution– that is what solidarity is. The past two years have been really horrible, and there have been so many awful moments, and me and Anam have said to each other many times that doing Gaza Champions is what got us through.  

AR: Yeah, it absolutely has kept me afloat. We are deeply personally affected by it, so to see that there are other people who care, and want to do something, even if they have never been to Gaza, is really uplifting. I like to focus on that. Of course there are the toxic trolls, and they make me want to do bad things, but if I didn’t have Gaza Champions, I don’t know where I would be right now.

You can support Gaza Champions or become one yourself! Sign up here.