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A gray table, three men, a light blue background with the party’s logo. This is what it looks like when the CDU presidential candidates meet under Corona. And then, unfortunately, the tall Friedrich Merz was placed in front of the presenter on the other long side, so he constantly had to stretch his long legs somewhere. Armin Laschet and Norbert Röttgen, on the other hand, sit so dynamically behind the table, as if they have already spent many hours here. Every now and then a service person comes with a mask and serves fresh water in thin glasses.
Nobody wanted an election campaign for the party leadership amid the pandemic. Not the candidates, the vast majority of citizens are currently interested in completely different things anyway, everything revolves around Corona these days.
If the candidate Laschet, by the way Prime Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia and therefore the head of crisis in the most populous German state, is writing briefly on his mobile phone while the contestant Merz gives a lecture on the topic of finance? Maybe a crisis SMS? In any case, that is one of the exciters of the first 90-minute meeting in the atrium of the CDU headquarters.
“How can we discuss well among ourselves in the CDU,” Laschet will formulate as a positive conclusion to the round. You could also say: If you take these and a half hours as your criteria, it doesn’t really matter which of the three gentlemen will be elected as the new party leader on January 16, and therefore is also a possible candidate for Chancellor of the Union for the next federal elections.
Laschet tries time and again to score points with his role as prime minister of the NRW, Röttgen wants to appear particularly modern, but also talks about “members” due to his progressiveness, while Merz seems more excited when he reports on his expected fifth grandson. It is a very harmonious night among the Christian Democrats.
For the first time since mid-October, the three candidates were back together in front of the camera; at that time they were virtually presented to the members of the Junge Union for the JU vote on the party leader. The former leader of the Merz parliamentary group was ultimately far ahead, unsurprisingly, because he is particularly well received by the more conservative descendants of the Union. On the other hand, it was more surprising that the foreign politician Röttgen came in second place at the time. However, Röttgen seems to have had something of a run since then, in various polls he was most recently ahead of Laschet. And some people are already wondering if those who started out as a blatant outsider even have a chance for a runoff at the end.
Because there is little doubt that Merz with his clear profile, even if he only shines here and there on Monday night, will make it to the second round. The interesting question is: who does he have to run for? This person, in turn, should have a good chance of being elected as the new party leader. Because none of the three have fans as euphoric as Merz, but none receive as much rejection. For Röttgen and Laschet, it’s really just a matter of getting to the second round and then hoping that the majority of the delegates will also elect you as president, so that only Merz is not.
The matter with the party congress is finally resolved
After all, it has now become clear how and when the CDU will get its new president. Finally. As a reminder: the current party leader, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, announced on February 10 that she was resigning from the presidency, that was more than ten months ago. But Kramp-Karrenbauer and the office stuck together like bubble gum: first the party congress scheduled for April in Berlin was canceled with the election of a successor due to Corona, then the delegates’ meeting in Stuttgart scheduled for earlier this month, also due to the pandemic.
But on January 16 the time has come: then the 1001 delegates will meet digitally for the first time in the party’s history and in this way elect the entire board, but initially the new party leader. Secretary-General Paul Ziemiak has rarely looked so proud when he explained the details to reporters Monday afternoon. In fact, in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany there has never been a federal party conference that includes board elections in digital form. And, apparently, Ziemiak has decided to highlight the opportunities of this experiment for himself and the CDU, rather than emphasize the risks and obstacles present.
Merz stuck to the idea of the presence party conference for a long time.
If nothing stands in the way, the Secretary General and his party will look unusually progressive early next year and will have cleared up the president’s question. Otherwise? “You can never find a 100 percent solution,” says the CDU leadership, otherwise it would have to hold a party presence conference. And now it is clear even to Merz, who held the idea for a long time, that this is prohibited in the near future in view of the crown situation.
To make the matter as safe as possible from a legal point of view, there will be a final written vote on each federal board position at the end, this result should be available on January 22. What Ziemiak and his people came up with at CDU headquarters sounds elaborate: You can still complain about the procedure, the Internet can fail, ballots can be lost, and in the worst case, digital voting could also be hacked by foreign services or whoever. . The secretary general swears that they have under contract “certified suppliers with a lot of know-how.”
The final vote issue also carries a certain personnel policy risk: “That’s a theoretical possibility,” Ziemiak admits when asked if delegates could vote differently in writing than before digitally. In other words: the winner of an expected (virtual) runoff election could stand in the final vote without a majority. Or someone, say the Federal Minister of Health, Jens Spahn, very popular in the CDU and who has so far supported Laschet, could, in the event of a Merz victory in the second round, declare that he will participate in the written vote.
That may seem theoretical and quite unlikely. But what if you could have predicted the evolution of the CDU in the current year?
What the 90-minute roundtable of the three gentlemen at the Adenauer-Haus covers: The candidates have been so tough on each other in recent months that the outgoing president was repeatedly prompted to warn of “ruinous competition.” The party is not as good as it seems. The CDU is hollow in terms of content, the good poll numbers are partly due only to the regained popularity of Chancellor Angela Merkel, and the Bavarian Prime Minister and CSU leader Markus Söder, who is suddenly very popular. throughout Germany, she wants to have at least a serious voice on the question of the Union’s candidacy for Chancellor. or even compete yourself.
Certainly, a little harmony cannot hurt, especially since you have to assume that the majority of the party’s congressional delegates have already made a decision. But perhaps one or the other candidate will want to differentiate himself a little more from the others than this time when the three gentlemen meet on January 8 for the second part of the round at the party headquarters.
It doesn’t have to be ruinous right away.
