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BERLIN – Chancellor Angela Merkel’s preferred successor, Armin Laschet, would have won the leadership of her center-right CDU, but he is still facing an uphill battle to lead the country’s most powerful political force to a federal election in September – the first of the post-Merkel era.
Although it was announced as a close race, Laschet won the internal party election on Saturday confidently as the successor of her Merkel allies Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer as chairwoman of the CDU. After a tight first round, in which reform candidate Norbert Rottgen was eliminated earlier in the day, Laschet collected a runoff against Friedrich Merz, a right-wing businessman and former rival of Merkel. The party’s rejection of Merz for the second time in as many years marks a clear victory for the Chancellor’s political legacy and prevents a shift to the right on a variety of issues from immigration to LGBT rights.
Laschet, the 59-year-old governor of North Rhine-Westphalia, the most populous federal state in Germany, is a symbol of stability and continuity for the post-Merkel era in terms of style and content. He supports most of Merkel’s signature initiatives, including her open door immigration policy. But whether he has what it takes to become the next Federal Chancellor remains unclear.
Laschet must first be named as a joint candidate for chancellor of the CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the CSU. The CSU heavyweight boss Markus Söder is waiting for him. In nationwide approval ratings only behind MerkelThe Bavarian Prime Minister is widely considered a solid bet to lead the bloc in the first election for almost two decades without the crisis-tested Merkel at the helm.
As CDU leader, Laschet will have the last word on who will be proposed as Merkel’s successor. But he cannot ignore Söder’s growing popularity. In a recent poll, 55 percent of German voters and 80 percent of CDU / CSU supporters agreed that Söder would be a good candidate for chancellor. Laschet achieved only 35 percent of the supporters of his own party and 27 percent of the broader electorate.
Laschet has played his cards closely so far. He will probably wait to see whether his CDU leadership victory increases his approval ratings before taking his next step, says Stefan Marschall, professor of comparative political science at Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf. “Laschet will be sensible,” said Marshal. “If he has the feeling that the odds are against him, it is logical that he should go along with someone else as candidate for chancellor so that he remains Prime Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia and emerges relatively unscathed.”
There is a precedent for such a step by Merkel herself, who stood by as CDU leader in 2002 to give the then CSU leader Edmund Stoiber a chance at chancellorship. He lost to Gerhard Schröder, and Merkel stood and won in the subsequent 2005 election.
This time, however, it is questionable whether Merkel would be happy if her close ally Laschet resigns in favor of the less predictable Söder. Even so, there is little she can do, at least in public, to intervene before the bloc’s final decision, which is expected to be made in March.
Meanwhile, Laschet has urgent work to do within the CDU. The new leader must quickly unite the party after a long period of uncertainty and introspection following Merkel’s 2018 announcement that she would slowly withdraw from politics.
In terms of style and content, Laschet is a symbol of stability and continuity in the post-Merkel era. But it is unclear whether he has what it takes to be the next Federal Chancellor.
There is no time to waste. Germany faces a record election year peppered with important races, starting with the state elections in the populous federal states of Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate on March 14th up to the groundbreaking national competition on September 26th.
The CDU leadership competition last weekend revealed the party’s divisions. The supporters of Merz are likely to remain loyal and hope to promote him to a prominent cabinet post after the election, with the finance or economics ministries winning the biggest prizes. Never a team player before, Merz may not be satisfied with quietly withdrawing into the shadows until then. Hours after his defeat, he earned himself ridicule online for Offer to join “the current government†as Minister of Economics– a position of Merkel’s ally Peter Altmaier.
Fortunately for the CDU, Laschet is a powerful mediator who is credited with leading and unifying a previously divided state party in North Rhine-Westphalia in 2017. The external pressures of the upcoming elections only help his cause. Laschet faces his thorniest problem with the voters. The COVID-19 pandemic has supported the support of the CDU / CSU, with the combined block survey at 35 percent, nine points more than at the beginning of last year. But even this boom has not completely dispelled fears that the union is struggling to remain a union People’s Party– a party in the big tent with wide appeal.
Without Merkel, this challenge will be even greater. Conservatives lack new visions to appeal to both disaffected rural voters and urban voters who fear climate change and the rise of the far right. Laschet still has to prove that he can master Merkel’s talent for the middle ground.
Merz’s proposed solution was to support the right-wing extremist Alternative for Germany (AfD) by leading the CDU sharply to the right following the pragmatic centrism of the Merkel era. It is perhaps understandable that the CDU rejected this vision. The AfD currently appears less threatening with 10 percent in surveys. after an all-time high of 19 percent in September 2018.
However, this could be a temporary rash. COVID-19 has spawned a new protest movement: a heady mix of coronavirus deniers, conspiracy theorists and far-right elements, the brash of whom attempted to storm the Reichstag in August – a premonition of the uprising in the U.S. Capitol this month. The always flexible AfD just has to take advantage of this untamed energy.
Much depends on the course of the pandemic and its economic consequences. The decisive factor for the political fate of the AfD could be upcoming regional surveys in the eastern federal states of Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, where the fringe parties find impressive support.
For Laschet, these surveys from the East are likely to cause serious headaches. The position of the CDU on cooperation with the AfD, which is taboo in German politics, or the left-wing extremist Die Linke, which is also strongly represented in the East, has yet to be clarified. The question can’t wait; Your indecisive answer last year triggered a crisis in the Thuringian state government after CDU members voted with the AfD to set up a new government. The resulting controversy led to the overthrow of Laschet’s CDU predecessor, Kramp-Karrenbauer.
But while Laschet’s leadership victory doesn’t help his party woo voters it has lost to the right in the long term, his liberal credentials raise the prospect of a post-election coalition with the lively Greens, which is currently at a stable 21 percent. If Laschet can convince business-friendly skeptics in his party to cooperate with the Greens, his victory on Saturday may have only brought the blurred outlines of the German Post-Merkel future into focus.
Josie Le Blond is a Berlin based editor, journalist and author. Her work has also appeared in The Guardian, Financial Times, Reuters and BBC Online. Follow her on Twitter @josieleblond.
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