The power he actually held
Friedrich Merz has been federal chancellor since 6 May 2025. Fifteen months is not sixteen years. The Basic Law still splits power with the Bundestag, the Länder, the Federal Constitutional Court, and the Union. A chancellor’s guideline is real. A personal tariff, a personal missile, and a personal Union regulation are not.
That limit is the first fact about his power. The second is that opposition votes and early statutes still move welfare. A politician who delivered the two-thirds for the 2022 special defence fund, spent two years demanding Taurus, then opened office with a harder migration line and a debt-brake fight is not a commentator. The live score has to read those instruments as they exist, not as a forecast of a completed era.
What went wrong, and what is proven
The 2025 migration guideline is the first cost file: faster removals, a reduction in irregular arrivals as a flagship, and a political decision to treat the file as the defining domestic test. Extended internal-Schengen controls, tighter benefits for rejected applicants, and a move to slow the 2024 citizenship easing sit on the same restrictiveness path. Rights groups documented the turn. Implementation still sits with the interior ministry, Länder, and courts. A guideline is not a rumour.
The debt-brake reopening is the second. After campaigning on fiscal caution he backed discussing Basic Law changes or special funds for defence and infrastructure. That is not automatically a crime. It is a reversal of a CDU brand, and public-debt sustainability moves both ways depending on the statute that finally passes. He had earlier used the Karlsruhe climate-fund judgment against the traffic light; using a court win in opposition does not freeze his own later exceptions.
In 2024 some CDU Land groups used AfD votes on procedural or local matters. Merz restated that there would be no federal coalition with the AfD and still had to answer for local breaches of the firewall. That is political polarization, not a federal coalition. The heating-law campaign and alignment with farmer protests belong on the same polarisation ledger: completed opposition acts, not vetoes.
BlackRock is prior employment, recorded as interest context, not as a 2025 statute. Treating it as a completed welfare event would be padding. Treating it as irrelevant to later financial-policy distrust would also be false. A slower near-term climate path is a completed political signal with a decarbonization cost if followed through; Union car and ETS floors still bind.
What improved, and how far
In June 2022, still in opposition, he voted the special defence fund. The statute is Scholz’s file; the two-thirds is shared. He spent 2022–2024 demanding Taurus and heavier weapons faster than Scholz delivered. A demand is not a delivery. As chancellor he visited Kyiv, restated weapons support, and backed a higher NATO spending path. Procurement lag remains.
Winning the February 2025 election, agreeing a coalition treaty, and the 6 May election in the Bundestag ended a minority-Scholz interlude. Democratic rotation is not a welfare miracle. It is still a completed constitutional sequence. An early Franco-German reset and talk of industrial electricity-price relief are dated diplomatic and industrial-policy openings, not delivered factories.
Shared responsibility, and what the score does not say
Olaf Scholz, Angela Merkel, the SPD coalition partner, Land CDU groups, Emmanuel Macron, and Volodymyr Zelenskyy are not extras. A two-thirds fund vote is shared. A Land AfD procedural vote is not a federal coalition. Union sanctions and accession talks are Council acts. Treating Merz as sole author of Zeitenwende, or as a bystander on 2025 migration, would be the same error in opposite directions.
The score does not say he is Merkel. It does not say BlackRock ran Germany. It does not convert a Thuringia state vote into a federal coalition. It does not say Taurus already flew. Confidence is high on the 2025 election, the 2022 fund vote, and published coalition migration language, and only medium where 2025–2026 statutes are still being implemented, or where procurement and allied calendars sit between the chancellery and a welfare indicator.
Latest developments (2026-10-15)
On October 15, Merz rejected the reported U.S. idea of unfreezing part of Russia’s sovereign assets and transferring them into a Washington-controlled structure as part of renewed Ukraine peace talks. Meduza, summarizing the Financial Times reporting, said U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner raised options in Miami with officials from Ukraine, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the European Union and NATO. European participants rejected handing control of the assets to another party or returning them to Moscow.
Merz’s intervention matters because most immobilized Russian central-bank assets are held in Europe, where governments and financial institutions bear much of the legal and custodial risk. His position is that assets frozen in Europe should remain under European control rather than become a U.S.-managed bargaining instrument. The strongest defence of Washington’s proposal is that asset treatment can be used as leverage in a comprehensive settlement if tied to enforceable Russian concessions. The criticism is sequencing: loosening sanctions before Russia has met verifiable conditions could give up leverage while the invasion continues. Merz is therefore staking out a sanctions-enforcement line that may complicate Trump’s negotiating track but is consistent with Europe’s insistence that decisions over European-held assets cannot be transferred by U.S. diplomacy alone.
