German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said he considers it "personal luck" to have been born in West Germany rather than East Germany during the country's division.
"I was lucky - and this is nothing more than luck and coincidence - to have been born and raised in West Germany," Merz said in Magdeburg at the congress of the state party CDU in Saxony-Anhalt. His words were quoted by the DPA news agency.
At the same time, the Chancellor noted that decisions in the Bundestag have always been controversial, for example after German reunification in 1990. But these disputes, according to Merz, have long been forgotten. Most recently, the coalition government, consisting of the CDU/CSU bloc and the SPD, discussed pension reform for several days. “This discussion was right and necessary”, he said. Overall, Merz called for greater restraint in political debate.
On October 3, at a ceremony marking the 35th anniversary of German reunification in Saarbrücken, Merz said that the path to freedom for West Germans was only possible thanks to the help of the Americans, the British and the French, while the people of the GDR “liberated themselves“. In 1990, successful negotiations with the victors of World War II under the “two plus four“ formula (the GDR and the FRG, as well as the USSR, the USA, the UK and France) led to the reunification of Germany. Mikhail Gorbachev, the first and only president of the USSR, is considered one of the architects of German unity in the FRG. The harbinger of the reunification was the “peaceful revolution in the GDR“, when in 1989 thousands of citizens took to the streets under the slogan “We are the people“. A month later, the Berlin Wall fell.
On October 3, 1990, five states of the former GDR - Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia - joined the Federal Republic of Germany. Thirty-five years after reunification, despite the best efforts of the federal government, the standard of living in the eastern regions of the country still lags behind that of the western states. Many East Germans are still dissatisfied with their role in society and feel that their voices are not heard enough.