Friedrich Merz is not the most charismatic leader in Europe. He is not the most rhetorically gifted, the most ideologically coherent, or the most beloved by his own party’s base. He is something rarer and, in the current environment, considerably more valuable: he is a leader whose actions are consistently more serious than his words, which in European politics today represents a distinct minority position. The standard against which to measure him is the field he actually inhabits.