KKR grandee donates to Friedrich Merz’s CDU ahead of German polls

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KKR grandee Johannes Huth has emerged as a top donor to German election frontrunner Friedrich Merz’s centre-right party as the campaign intensifies ahead of polls next month.

Huth, former head of the US private equity giant in Europe and now a senior advisory partner, gifted €50,000 to the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) on January 2, according to Bundestag disclosures.

The donation breaks with previous German elections, when Huth twice chose to back only the liberal FDP, headed by former finance minister Christian Lindner, according to Abgeordnetenwatch, a campaign transparency group.

The CDU is leading in opinion polls ahead of elections on February 23. A former chair of US asset manager BlackRock in Germany, Merz is widely expected to become the next chancellor of the Eurozone’s biggest economy. 

Huth declined to comment. A person familiar with the situation said the executive remained a backer of the FDP at a similar level, without adding further details.

Donations are not capped in Germany and are published by the Bundestag when they exceed €35,000. Parties that secure at least 0.5 per cent of votes in EU or parliamentary elections — or at least 1 per cent in regional elections — also receive public funding.

Records show that Huth’s KKR colleague, Philipp Freise, who is now co-head of the firm’s European private equity operations, has stuck with Lindner, making a donation of €50,000 to the FDP in early December.

It was made weeks after social democratic Chancellor Olaf Scholz sacked the finance minister from his three-party government and set the stage for early elections. Freise donated to the Liberal party in the past two elections, as well as to the CDU in 2017. Freise declined to comment.

The CDU and sister party CSU have amassed more than €4mn from donations from individuals and companies in excess of €35,000 — almost half the total disclosed since Lindner’s ousting on November 6.

Among the donors is senior Goldman Sachs banker Christoph Brand, who donated €37.500 this month, following a €40,000 gift last April. While Brand used Goldman Sachs’ office address in Frankfurt, a person familiar with the matter told the FT that the donation was made in a personal capacity and unrelated to the bank.

Brand has been a long-standing party member and is the treasurer of Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, a foundation affiliated to the CDU. He declined to comment through a spokesperson.

Rick van Aerssen, one of three global managing partners at magic circle law firm Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, in January donated €50,000 to the CDU. Van Aerssen said that he had been a CDU member since his youth and regularly donates in a private capacity.

Surveys suggest Merz’s party could win about 30 per cent of the vote, making it the largest political party in parliament. The business community has rallied behind Merz, who has promised to cut corporate tax and slash red tape to revive Germany’s stagnating economy. 

Huth’s new bet on the CDU also comes as the FDP is projected to win about 4 per cent of the vote on February 23, below the 5 per cent threshold to secure seats in the Bundestag. Lindner’s party, which secured 11.5 per cent in 2021, has suffered since it emerged FDP officials had plotted to precipitate the collapse of the coalition.

Huth and Freise are prominent business figures. They both sit on the supervisory board of Axel Springer, the Berlin-based media empire that owns Politico as well as the powerful German tabloid Bild and the broadsheet Die Welt.

Their donations are the latest political intervention by senior figures at the company, which is close to completing a €13.5bn split from KKR after a five-year partnership.

Another supervisory board member, entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky, last week said that he had facilitated an opinion piece by Elon Musk, published at the end of December by Welt am Sonntag, in which the world’s richest man outlined his support for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).