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The CDU elects its new boss. But the great prize is not the leadership of the party, but the candidacy for chancellor.
After eleven months of internal electoral campaigns, the CDU will elect its new head on Saturday at a party digital conference. Still no optimism, just signs of fatigue. But the CDU probably won’t stop for long. Regardless of whether the new boss is Friedrich Merz, Armin Laschet or Norbert Röttgen.
At least the candidates Merz and Laschet squint at the Foreign Ministry. For them, with their hand on their hearts, the leadership of the party is only a means to an end. Seen this way, the party congress only clarifies who will not be a candidate for chancellor. The two losers in the presidential election are out of the running. However, there is no automatic mechanism according to which the next head of the CDU can also run as a candidate for chancellor of the CDU / CSU. Even if historically it was the rule. But the CSU has something to say. The decision will be made in the spring. Until then, there will probably be riots.
Of course, if Laschet is ahead of the game, it takes a lot of imagination to imagine how he could still be avoided as a candidate for chancellor without harming the party as a whole. As prime minister, Laschet heads the most populous federal state in North Rhine-Westphalia. His supporters include other influential national leaders such as Volker Bouffier. But the surveys of Merkel’s confidante are bad, that is contagious to the CDU, nothing is unthinkable. The baptism of fire for the next boss will take place on March 14 in Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate anyway. If state elections there fail, all scenarios will be implemented in the CDU and CSU.
If the CDU crowns Merz as head on Saturday, the power struggles could be even more violent. Merkel’s environment will probably look for ways to prevent her former rival as a successor in the Chancellery, which she irritated a few months ago with a radical attack on the CDU “establishment”.
The German media will also cause constant disturbances. It will shake the numbers, according to which the majority of the German head of the CSU, Markus Söder, wants to be a candidate for chancellor and not Laschet, nor Merz, nor Röttgen. It is quite unlikely that the Bavarian will leave the nest that has been made in Munich and enter the Chancellery in a convulsed phase. But not completely excluded either.
And CDU party leaders like Wolfgang Schäuble and parliamentary group leader Ralph Brinkhaus are challenging the unwritten law that the chancellor candidate must be the leader of the CDU or CSU party. The Junge Union is already implicitly touching Jens Spahn, the Health Minister who plays on Armin Laschet’s team. With his support for Laschet, Spahn had woven a great story: the hopeful young man joins the group. He, the conservative, supports Laschet the liberals. A service to the divided party. That was the message. But now reports that the popular Spahn was exploring his own chances for chancellor behind Lascher’s back scratch the image of the modest CDU reconciler. If Spahn has ambitions, he will now publicly put them on hold. Reduce. The question is: how long?
The CDU is characterized by iron discipline. “Chancellor’s Electoral Association” they call it scoffers. But this discipline is being put to the test like never before in this exceptional year, in which, for the first time in post-war German history, the incumbent chancellor will no longer stand. Christian Democrats face tough times.
