Laschet, Merz, Röttgen and the two invisible ones

GRAMIn the end it appeared: the fourth man. The three candidates for the position of president of the CDU had debated for an hour and a half from Berlin in a video contest organized by the Junge Union. In the final words, Armin Laschet was last in line after Friedrich Merz and Norbert Röttgen. In thirty seconds, each candidate must say why he is the best as the new president of the CDU. Laschet said he wanted to fight for the CDU to remain the party at the center. He wants to do that together with Jens Spahn, who is on his team.

The day of the first meeting of the three hopefuls en route to the party conference in Stuttgart on December 4, at which the successor to outgoing president Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer will be elected, had begun for some with Spahn. A survey conducted by the Kantar Institute for the “Funke Mediengruppe” newspapers was reported. You could read that the interviewees were more likely to trust that Federal Minister of Health Spahn would make a good CDU president than the three actual applicants. But Spahn just wants to become a deputy. Or, to be more precise, because no one can see into Spahn’s head: he has reached an agreement with the Prime Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, Laschet, to run as an alternate in the leadership of the CDU if Laschet becomes President.

But enough of Spahn. Laschet, Merz and Röttgen took the opportunity on Saturday night to be interviewed by Junge Union (JU). In the next two weeks, the JU will conduct a member poll on who is the best candidate for the CDU presidency. This is still important for a mood picture, but it does not change the fact that each JU delegate at the party congress in Stuttgart can decide for himself who to vote for.

Friendly and objective handling

The round of videos, which could be followed on social networks and on television, did not facilitate the decision. The event was as far removed from the wildness of the recent television duel between US presidential candidates Trump and Biden, as was the CDU in the Animal Welfare Party polls. Merz, Laschet and Röttgen were not only courteous, they were even friendly to each other at times. In any case, aim at everything.

After all, Laschet tried from the beginning to leverage his single most important selling point towards the other two. He occupies an important government office, while Röttgen is chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Bundestag and can only remember that he was once a Federal Minister for the Environment and Merz never had a government office. So Laschet listed everything he does in day-to-day government: holding society together in the pandemic, helping companies at risk, fighting climate change by phasing out coal, and cutting red tape.

Merz, who stood between Laschet and Röttgen, tried to combine the determination and clarity attributed to him with confessions that some critics may miss in him. You have to get out of the Corona crisis with the right economic and financial policy, he said at the beginning. However, this should not be done against ecology, but against the environment. “I am in favor of the ecological renewal of the social market economy.” There was what was expected and what was not automatically attributed to him in a sentence. Merz, who had criticized Chancellor Angela Merkel quite often in the past, now said that the end of her reign meant “not a break,” but a transition into a new era. Then again concise sentences, as his followers expect of him: “This country has become too slow. We are too lazy. “