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The CDU presidential race will be decided in January, but the party’s new leader is not automatically a candidate for chancellor. Wolfgang Schäuble and Armin Laschet think this is conceivable.
The President of the Bundestag, Wolfgang Schäuble (CDU), and the Prime Minister of the NRW, Armin Laschet, consider it possible that the candidate for Chancellor of the Union comes from the CSU. The number of candidates for the chancellor bid is manageable and could be “maybe someone from the CSU,” Schäuble said in an interview with the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.”
“Every president of the CDU must be qualified to become a candidate for chancellor, and he must want to,” Schäuble added. “But it could also be someone else. Franz Josef Strauss and Edmund Stoiber of the CSU were also known to be candidates for chancellor.” In contrast to the election of the CDU president two years ago, Schäuble did not commit to any of the candidates. In 2019 he still supported the candidacy of Friedrich Merz (CDU) to succeed Angela Merkel at the top of the party. Merz then lost to Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer.
Laschet: Chancellor Candidate Not Based On Polls Only
Laschet also does not rule out the head of the CSU, Markus Söder, as a candidate for Union chancellor. “We will discuss this together,” Laschet said, introducing a new edition of a biography on Söder. “I think a CDU president should also show respect for the sister party that one says, in principle: Both are conceivable. The two praesidia together will make a proposal. That has always been the case in recent years,” Laschet said. “And if a CDU president ruled out the possibility of a CSU president, that’s not part of the justice we need,” Laschet emphasized.
Laschet is applying for the presidency of the CDU together with the former leader of the Union parliamentary group Friedrich Merz and the head of foreign policy Norbert Röttgen and is therefore considered a possible candidate for chancellor. “In the first place, the candidate for chancellor of the Union will be the one we believe has the best chance of winning,” Laschet said. But this should not only be measured by surveys. “We just saw: Markus Söder’s polls were once the worst in Germany, now they are the best. The polls fluctuate from one side to the other.”
Goodbye to a “strong chancellor”
The CDU wants to decide on its next president at a digital party conference in mid-January. In the FAZ interview, Schäuble now advocates making the decision on the chancellor candidate as late as possible. That should happen “between Easter and Pentecost” next year. Pentecost is at the end of May, general elections will be held at the end of September. Schäuble justified his recommendation to wait as long as possible before establishing the candidate for chancellor by saying that it would be difficult for any candidate to prevail alongside Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU).
Whoever becomes one should be interested in ensuring that time with “such a strong chancellor” does not last too long, Schäuble said. As Chancellor Merkel she is “so strong that there is little room for political leadership in the Union alongside her.”
The next CDU leader will be determined in January at a party digital conference with a subsequent mail-in vote.
