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Germany’s largest ruling party, the Conservative CDU, will elect a new president on January 16. Normally, the party leader would be the candidate for chancellor of the CDU / CSU party alliance, but this is not the case now. Angela Merkel, who will continue her political career as chancellor in 2021, has cast a heavy shadow over the party.
The year 2021 begins with an important event in Germany and Europe: Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party, the CDU, will hold its presidential elections on January 16. The most interesting element of this political competition is that the possible president of the most popular party has not even started the campaign, according to a summary in the Financial Times. The party will be decided between three candidates.
One of them is Friedrich Merz, who campaigns with an emphatically conservative message. Merz left politics twenty years ago and continued his career as an investment banker because he couldn’t get along with the centrist Merkel, but now he would return to politics. The other is the moderate Armin Laschet, the provincial prime minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, and the third is Norbert Röttgen, chairman of the Bundestag’s foreign affairs committee, the party’s leading foreign policy expert.
In the shadow of the minister
However, recent polls show that the CDU’s most popular politician today is Health Minister Jens Spahn, who has earned recognition for his good handling of the coronavirus epidemic. His problem is that in February, even before the epidemic, he committed to Laschet as vice president. The German press has recently speculated that they might change seats, but this was ruled out by the provincial prime minister. According to him, many in the party support the lineup that has been decided for almost a year. None of Spahn’s close allies see the exchange as likely, saying the high-profile electorate in the political game loves betrayal but despises traitors.
However, the tight situation is not good for the party president’s election campaign. As the author of an opinion piece recently published in the Franfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) put it, three candidates are running for the presidency of the CDU, but none of them can inspire party affiliation. It is related to the lack of a really percussive candidate that the party also has a fourth baseline player, namely Markus Söder, chairman of the sister party, the Bavarian CSU.
I should be chancellor too
The two parties will have to agree sometime in the spring who will be their joint chancellor candidate in the September 2021 parliamentary elections. Normally, this should not be in doubt, as the CDU is a much larger party than the CSU. , but now the situation is different. Söder has also done well in the fight against the coronavirus epidemic, with his popularity surpassing the three CDU presidential candidates. According to a ZDF TV poll, 58 percent of those surveyed could imagine a candidate for chancellor.
In addition, he received unexpected support from the CDU. Namely, former Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, president of the Bundestag, told FAZ that Germany could be a candidate for chancellor of the CDU / CSU of the CSU. However, he acknowledged that the decision was hampered by the fact that they had tried twice to win with a CSU candidate, led by Franz Josef Strauss in 1980 and then by Edmond Stoiber in 2002, but lost. Germany, by the way, was led by the Conservative duo in 50 of the last 70 years.
A political earthquake is coming
A live online discussion of the three CDU candidates revealed that there was no substantial difference between their political offers. Röttgen said the party should be younger, more feminine and more digital, Laschet said that Germany should remain an industrial superpower while taking a major role in fighting climate change, Merz would like more debate on conservative identity versus politicization centrist. However, none of them addressed the main issue, that is, how they envision the country after Merkel, who has been ruling for 16 years, says Robert Vehrkamp, a political scientist at the Bertelsmann Fund research institute.
Despite the party’s precarious leadership, the CDU is the most popular party in Germany. According to the latest polls, if the elections were now on Sunday, they would receive 36 percent of the votes (Greens 18.4, Social Democrat SPD 16.3, Eurosceptic AfD 9.3, Left Left 7.8, Liberal Market Party FDP 6.3 percent). However, Vehrkamp said the figures are misleading because they correspond to Merkel’s immense popularity, giving the party a sense of false security. The political scientist believes that the CDU vastly underestimates the problem they face in the post-Angela Merkel era.
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