The German government party CDU wants to elect its new president on April 25, during an extra party congress. In a year and a half, the new party chairman must also become the party leader in the parliamentary elections and thus also the successor to Angela Merkel as Federal Chancellor.
Normally the CDU would only elect a new president in December. But there has been a discussion in the party for some time about the difficult cooperation with the Social Democratic SPD. Merkel's center-left coalition fellow is ideologically pulled to the left by the rise of De Grünen and Die Linke, while on the right flank of the CDU the extreme right-wing AfD is also growing strongly.
Within the CDU, some of the leaders did not hide the fact that they did not share Merkel's choice for her own succession, and in recent months the party chairman Annegret Kamp-Karrenbauer, who was elected last year, fell openly.
Her political leadership came high on the agenda again early this month following the recent political crisis in Thuringia. The Thuringian CDU members had gone against the party line not to cooperate with the extreme right-wing AfD. President Kramp-Karrenbauer did not get a grip on her fellow party members in the East German state and announced that she would retire in the long term.
But partly due to the historic defeat in the state elections last Sunday in Hamburg, the party does not want to wait too long, German media report. In Hamburg the party dropped to third place, with barely thirteen percent of the votes. The CDU does not benefit from a months-long struggle for the succession of AKK and Merkel.
Over the past two weeks, the CDU hoped to find a team solution behind the scenes, in which potential candidates for the presidency would agree on the division of party functions, without involving an election struggle. That does not seem to have succeeded.
To date, potential candidates for the CDU Presidency are Friedrich Merz (64), Armin Laschet (58), Norbert Röttgen (54) and Jens Spahn (39). The conservative Merz is regarded as the man who can keep the competition from the extreme right-wing AfD at bay. But he has not been politically active for the past 10 years. Nor does he seem like the person who binds many people to him as a party leader.
That is more for Laschet (58), Prime Minister of the Land of North Rhine-Westphalia. He belongs to the liberal CDU wing and has always followed Merkel's course. That is also his disadvantage at the same time, in the open fight for the race: does the CDU move more to the conservative right or does the party remain moderate center?
Röttgen, former minister of the environment, has a lot of international experience as chairman of the foreign committee in the Bundestag. He is so far the only one who has also said that he wants to be chairman and list leader. Spahn, the ambitious Minister of Health, is, just like Merz, a conservative and an opponent of Merkel's middle course.