The three contenders in Saturday's leadership contest: (from left) Norbert Roettgen, Friedrich Merz and Armin Laschet
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Angela Merkel’s party is struggling to find a replacement for her as it finally holds a much delayed vote to choose a new leader this week.
With just nine months to go, the Christian Democrat party (CDU) is no closer to knowing who will lead it September’s elections
Party delegates will vote on Saturday in a leadership contest that was supposed to take place last April but postponed twice and is now taking place online because of the coronavirus pandemic. But it looks increasingly likely that none of the three men vying for the leadership will be the CDU’s candidate for chancellor in September.
Instead, amid misgivings over all three, the talk in the party is of getting the leadership contest out of the way and parachuting in an alternative chancellor candidate.
It was never going to be easy to replace Mrs Merkel, but few would have predicted it would be this hard when she announced she was standing down as party leader in 2018. Mrs Merkel wanted to be the first German chancellor to plan a smooth succession, but her anointed heir, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, proved to be a disaster.
Things went from bad to worse when Ms Kramp-Karrenbauer announced she too was stepping down last February. The coronavirus has wreaked havoc with the quest to find a successor — and not just by forcing the CDU to postpone its leadership contest.
Hard to replace: Angela Merkel
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Armin Laschet, the regional prime minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, was supposed to be the new standard bearer for the Merkellian centrists, but he has had a terrible pandemic. An early champion of easing lockdown, he was widely blamed for soaring infection rates, and many in the party now fear he is a vote loser.
“If we judge what happened with today’s knowledge, there were certainly decisions we would have made differently,” he said recently. “We politicians who are responsible can only ask forgiveness.”
His main competitor on Saturday has fared no better. A former rival of Mrs Merkel’s who quit politics for the business world after losing control of the party to her in 2002, Friedrich Merz remains popular with the CDU’s conservative wing.
But the pandemic has sidelined him. The virus left his pitch to win back voters from the far-Right Alternative for Germany party (AfD) looking irrelevant, and with no active political role he disappeared from television screens. A Trumpian outburst when he complained the postponment of the party conference was a deliberate attempt to derail his campaign did him no favours.
Armin Laschet, the frontrunner
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The third contender on Saturday, Norbert Röttgen, is widely seen as a rank outsider — a perception only reinforced when he openly acknowledged he probably won’t be chancellor candidate even if he wins the party leadership.
“Laschet will probably win,” says Dr Gero Neugebauer of Berlin’s Free University. “Germans like politicians who apologise, and his acknowledgement he made mistakes will make the delegates feel able to choose him. But he won’t necessarily be chancellor candidate.”
That’s possible because German parties traditionally name a chancellor candidate separately. The CDU leader is usually a shoo-in, but that hasn’t always been the case — Mrs Merkel herself stood aside for Edmund Stoiber in 2002.
Jens Spahn, the health minister
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It emerged this week that Mr Spahn, the health minister, has been in talks about making a bid for the candidacy despite publicly backing Mr Laschet for the leadership. An outspoken critic of Mrs Merkel until she brought him into her cabinet, Mr Spahn has seen his star rise in the pandemic and is now second only to her in public approval ratings. But his hopes may have been damaged after he was widely blamed for the debacle that has seen Germany, the country where the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was developed, facing shortages.
The other candidate being talked of isn’t even a CDU member. Markus Söder, the Bavarian regional prime minister, is considered to have had a good pandemic, and as leader of the CDU’s Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), he could run as its candidate for chancellor.
The facts don’t really bear out Mr Söder’s reputation for competence — he has done little different from other regional leaders and Bavaria has worse infection figures than Mr Laschet’s home state.
Markus Soeder, Bavarian regional prime minister
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“It comes down to communication,” says Dr Neugebauer. “Söder convinced people he’d done a better job. And there may be an element of the old desire for a decisive leader, some one who isn’t afraid to go his own way. Söder says,‘Follow me’. Laschet seems to be led by events.”
But history is against Mr Söder. The CDU has twice before gone into an election with a CSU chancellor candidate — and both times it was a disaster.
Almost three years after Mrs Merkel announced she was stepping down, we still don’t know who will succeed her. And the chances are we won’t be any wiser on Saturday. The latest talk is that the CDU may not name its chancellor candidate until after Easter.
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