© REUTERS/Annegret Hilse

It’s been two decades since the Christian Democratic Union, or CDU, had its last major crisis. In December 1999, the shock of losing office in the previous year’s federal election was compounded by revelations about illegal donations during the long reign of Chancellor Helmut Kohl. This was the moment of Angela Merkel’s ascent to leadership. Twenty years later, as the Merkel era draws slowly to a close, we can begin to discern the new burdens she has bequeathed the CDU. The party is riven by factionalism, the leadership question unresolved, and its public support has fallen dramatically. Today it is not at all clear if Merkel’s successors will be able to overcome the crisis and renew the CDU’s role as the stable core of the German party system.

Merkel, the first female head of government in Germany’s history, planned to be the first German chancellor to stage-manage her own departure. But this difficult experiment in governance failed at the first hurdle. After just a year as party leader, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, her hand-picked successor, has now stepped down, exhausted. Short of authority within the party, Kramp-Karrenbauer was unable to reconcile its conflicts, offer new policy perspectives, or stem the rapid fall in the polls. As recently as the 2013 federal election, the CDU won 41.5 percent of the popular vote. Today, its poll ratings languish somewhere in the mid-20s. Recent state elections in Hamburg saw a mere 11 percent of voters opting for the CDU. For a party long used to dominating the German political scene, this is an alarming signal.

Few in the party would dispute that the CDU has moved distinctly leftward during Merkel’s two decades at the helm. On women, family, migration, defense, and energy, Merkel has abandoned long-held policy positions and dramatically reduced the influence of conservatives. On the right of the German political landscape, CDU influence has declined so sharply that a new right-wing party—the Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD—has managed to enter state parliaments across the country, as well as the federal parliament, for the first time in the post-war era.

Merkel has succeeded in maintaining the party’s grip on power in Berlin since 2005, cementing her position as its leader. At the same time, however, Merkel’s unideological pragmatism has unleashed an identity crisis within the CDU, primarily afflicting her conservative critics. Merkel’s principal weakness does not lie in her political responses to new challenges, which have often gone against long-held party positions. Rather, the problem lies in her failure to aggressively address the tension between her policies and traditional ideas in the party and, more broadly, in society. Communication has never been her forte. Merkel may have successfully pushed through her policies, but she has rarely made the case for them. This has prompted, at least since the 2015 refugee crisis, intense resistance within the party, bubbling below the surface of her pragmatic governing style.   

Paradoxical Challenges

Merkel’s successor must now overcome these divisions. But the CDU’s strategic dilemma goes further than the loss of right-wing voters to the AfD. Further left, they are losing at least as many to the Green Party. So her successor, whoever it is, will face a paradoxical challenge, requiring a simultaneous answer to both problems. The next leader must appeal to voters on the right, while also shoring up support among erstwhile Merkel voters in the political center. Conservatives within the party must be kept within the tent, while preparations are made for the strong likelihood that only a coalition with the Greens will achieve a majority after the next federal elections.

Kramp-Karrenbauer, often known as AKK, failed to meet this paradoxical challenge. At the December 2018 party conference, she won a very narrow victory over Friedrich Merz, the representative of conservative forces in the party. Precisely because of her image as Merkel’s favored candidate, she sought to broaden her base among right-wing members. But while her signals failed to resonate with that wing, they managed to annoy her liberal followers. This hobbled her authority from the start.

Friedrich Merz and his supporters never really accepted defeat—neither at the hands of AKK in 2018, nor, much earlier, at the hands of Merkel. After losing a power struggle to Merkel in 2002, Merz left politics for a career in business. In the years since, he served as a projection screen for conservative forces within the CDU, helped by his polished rhetoric and slick public performances. His political persona and clear opposition to Merkel have made him the darling of the right wing, to whom he has appealed with promises to halve AfD support with an agenda of economic modernization and strong domestic security. Skeptics, however, regard him as yesterday’s man.

Rupture or Continuity?

Merz is the disruptive candidate: his victory would inevitably mean an open power struggle with Merkel and a clear break with the long era her leadership has defined. Although revered by supporters, Merz is deeply feared by liberals in the party, who ideally want to see a continuation of Merkelism, even in the absence of Merkel herself. By now, however, even critics of the chancellor dimly recognize that breaking with the politics of the last two decades is not a promising route to electoral success. Merkel retains too much popularity among voters, with substantial popular support for her legacy. This means Merz’s candidacy is ultimately unlikely to win over a majority of the party.

Enter a surprising second candidate for party leadership. Like Merz, Norbert Röttgen had seemed a figure from the past, a man with his political future squarely behind him. Röttgen had once been viewed as Merkel’s crown prince, but a dramatic loss in the 2013 North Rhine-Westphalia state elections made Merkel oust him from the succession. But unlike the conservative Merz, Röttgen offers a liberal alternative to the chancellor, presenting conviction politics with rhetorical and intellectual brilliance. Were he to win the leadership, the overall direction of German politics would not change, but he would seek to end the prevailing stasis in key policy areas, including climate change, European policy, and migration. His politics is marked by active political discourse: his main difference with Merkel is her reactive style of politics, where policies are not supported with convincing arguments.

Röttgen would be the perfect chancellor for a CDU-Green coalition at the federal level, and for this reason, he would be a serious opponent against the Greens. But this position also drives the strong opposition he faces from the party’s right wing. So like Merz, albeit for diametrically opposed reasons, he would find it difficult to reconcile the CDU’s bitter divisions. Moreover, Röttgen does not enjoy universal popularity on the party’s left wing, where he is widely regarded as distant and unapproachable. All in all, this suggests Röttgen’s leadership would be unlikely to bring about the intellectual renewal the party needs.

The Winner: Laschet

For this reason, Merkel’s ultimate successor will probably be Armin Laschet, currently state premier of North Rhine-Westphalia. Leading the CDU in the country’s most populous state may seem to preordain him for federal leadership, but Laschet’s political temperament means he falls short of being a shoo-in. He tends to be risk-averse, always looking to cover his back. His political career has already seen several bitter defeats. Like Kramp-Karrenbauer, his predecessor as heir apparent, he is regarded as a Merkel loyalist, but his leadership would likely see a number of changes in emphasis.

Laschet’s failure to present renewal with any real authority meant his chances against the more impactful Merz and Röttgen had seemed remote. But Laschet has recently managed to pull off an important coup, convincing Health Minister Jens Spahn to  endorse his leadership bid and abandon his own candidacy This was highly significant in the succession battle, since Spahn can help win over CDU conservatives who see Merz as either too brutal or too outmoded. During the refugee crisis, Spahn had made his name as one of Merkel’s strongest critics: for a time, he was one of her most open opponents, regularly taking public positions critical of Islam.

However, since losing the leadership race in 2018, Spahn has largely abandoned his right-wing attacks on Merkel, instead concentrating on his ministerial responsibilities. In other words, having adequately demonstrated his credentials as a conservative alternative, he has now sought broader acceptance within the party. With little chance of winning in a field containing Laschet, Merz, and Röttgen, an alliance with Laschet is highly useful. If Laschet wins, his new ally will have established an excellent position in the party. At 39, Spahn is already the most power-conscious CDU politician of his generation. He can afford to wait a little longer.

For Laschet, Spahn should help to bring in key voices from the moderate conservative camp, which he needs if he is to win the leadership. But winning is one thing, actually ushering in a new era for the CDU is quite another. Ruling North Rhine-Westphalia may mark the upper limit of Laschet’s political capacities: although he is now favorite to succeed Merkel, he may not be up to the task of filling her shoes. Like Kramp-Karrenbauer before him, Laschet enjoys limited authority with conservatives in the party, while his influence among liberals is too weak to assuage CDU worries ahead of a tough fight with the Greens for the political center.

Danger for the System

Many indications thus suggest that the latest succession battle could result in another temporary solution. But this is something the party can ill afford. Jens Spahn may well be correct in suggesting the CDU faces the greatest crisis of its history. But unlike in earlier periods of weakness, the weakness of the CDU now also threatens to undermine the stability of the political system as a whole. In previous decades, when the CDU exhausted its political capital after long periods in power, the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) stood ready to take control. But today’s SPD can no longer play the role of a second large catch-all party. It remains to be seen whether the Greens can take its place as an anchor of systemic stability. In this way, the CDU crisis extends directly into the political heart of Germany as currently constituted. Not since Konrad Adenauer has a CDU leader had to bear such momentous responsibility.

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© REUTERS/Hannibal Hanschke

Here are three takeaways from the earthquake in German politics:

First, the next leader of Germany’s conservatives will be a man—and politically quite different from Chancellor Angela Merkel and her preferred successor Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, who announced her resignation on Monday. Personally speaking, my money is on Jens Spahn, the current health minister, over the former CDU grandee Friedrich Merz and North Rhine-Westphalia State Premier Armin Laschet.

Second, the Christian Democrats’ new leader will face Herculean task. He will need to reconcile the different political wings and bridge the deep divide between East and West within the party. He also must find an effective way of countering the rise of the extreme-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Otherwise, Merkel’s CDU risks marginalization.

Third, please look at who has, at least for now, survived once again: Angela Merkel and her grand coalition. Both have weathered hard storms. Merkel is still looking cool and unruffled while her SPD coalition partners appear increasingly frazzled, but don’t count either out. Both the chancellor and her government could last until the end of their regular term in the fall of 2021.

Stability and Turmoil

Germany is a strange mixture of stability and turmoil these days. Despite numerous coalition crises, Merkel is well into her 15^th year in office at home and well respected, even admired abroad. A safe pair of hands if ever there was one, she is a safe haven from the rapid, profound changes that have upturned politics in most Western countries.

Germans largely share this view. Angela Merkel continues to be the country’s most popular politician—a truly astonishing feat after such a long time in office. At the same time, a quick survey showed, most Germans do not want her to change her mind about leaving the Chancellery and run for a fifth term in office. Even though they are risk averse, they are conscious of how stagnant the country has become under Merkel.

In late 2018, when she gave up the party leadership, Merkel also promised not to run for chancellor again. With her blessing, the CDU elected Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, a centrist from the western state of Saarland, to lead the party. AKK, as she is known, also seemed likely to become Merkel’s successor in the chancellery.

Having Her Power and Eating It

But all too quickly, the fault lines of Merkel’s succession project became visible: you can’t have your power and eat it. Merkel was determined to hold on to control over her government as well as her legacy, and AKK wasn’t ruthless enough to challenge her. As a result, her authority over the party was weak. Of course, she made mistakes, too, both as party leader and later as defense minister. Kramp-Karrenbauer’s doomed proposal for an international security zone in Syria—made with no prior consultation even within the German government—is just one example.

Nevertheless, AKK might have continued and recovered if not for the political impasse in the small eastern state of Thuringia. Regional elections last autumn resulted in heavy losses for the state’s Christian Democrats, who were then faced with a devilish choice: vote for a government led by the formerly communist Left Party, join votes with the far-right AfD to elect a state premier, or accept that no coalition can be formed and call for new elections.

The face and leader of Thuringia’s AfD is the right-wing extremist Björn Höcke, a wily player who managed to lure the CDU deputies into jointly voting for a Liberal candidate. For the first time, a mainstream politician in Germany gained office due to votes from the AfD. Outrage ran high, and the new state premier resigned after only a day. But for AKK, who proved unable to enforce her ban on fraternizing with the AfD, the damage was done. It didn’t help that Merkel interfered from abroad, calling the vote “unforgivable.” The Thuringia CDU has fallen in the polls since the scandal , while the Left Party is gaining support.

Kramp-Karrenbauer threw in the towel on Monday. In her statement, she included a sharp dig at Merkel. “Separating the chancellery from the party chairmanship, the open question of who will be candidate for the chancellery, this weakens the CDU,” she said.

Not So Quick

Yet AKK did not call for a quick changeover of power. According to the timetable she presented, she plans to remain in office as party leader of the CDU until the next regular congress in December. At that gathering, the CDU would choose a new chair, who would also be nominated as top candidate for the next elections. Merkel and her coalition government could remain in place until the autumn of 2021, according to AKK’s plan.

Can the CDU’s leadership issues wait that long? Possibly not, but Merkel’s would-be successors also recognize the dangers of being nominated too far ahead of an election. On Monday, Spahn, Merz, and Laschet all showed a great deal of restraint in claiming the top job.

Whoever it will be, whenever it happens—the new CDU leader’s job is not going to be easy. After nearly two decades of Merkel’s centrist policy, the party is torn between continuing along her line or moving back to the right. There is no consensus, either, about how to deal with the AfD’s success particularly in eastern Germany. After Thuringia, the next regional elections in the East will take place in Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, very possibly leading to similar political impasses.

But after this Monday, one thing at least is clear: whether it takes 18 months or less, for Angela Merkel and the stable state she has come to represent, the countdown has begun. Brace for change in Germany and Europe.

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© REUTERS/Kai Pfaffenbach

As soon as an extremely relieved Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer had ascended the conference stage in Hamburg on December 7 and accepted the leadership of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), it was obvious what Germany’s right-wing political establishment made of her. Old men, their yearning for simpler times written in little veins across their pink cheeks, were elbowing each other aside to find a TV camera into which they could bluster and denounce the failure of nerve among the great Christian conservatives.
The attack lines were foreshadowed, and the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), to which the CDU has been bleeding votes, was getting ready for a field day. In fact, AfD Bundestag member Gottfried Curio had already come up with an appropriate gag: “AKK,” he told the chamber just over a week earlier, could only be short for “absolut konstante Katastrophe” (“an absolutely constant catastrophe”).

Not another Angela Merkel! Not another aloof, careful, centrist prevaricating compromiser. Not another woman! By shying away from Friedrich Merz, the political embodiment of the alpha-male DAX boardroom, the party of Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Kohl had missed the chance to carve out a clear new path (or at least re-carve a weed-ridden old path).

But there are more complex interpretations. Those struggling to spot the differences between Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer and her predecessor might want to go on YouTube and watch one of AKK’s annual performances as “Cleaning Lady Gretel” in the carnival in Saarland, the state she governed for seven years.

They might find it more painful than funny (the forced mirth of western Germany’s Karneval might be the tradition that forever calcified the country’s comedy reputation). Still, watching the sight of a top conservative in an apron and broom delivering a solid half-hour of slapstick gags might also help one understand why a majority of CDU delegates picked her in Hamburg, and why many may even have thought of her as a more amenable leader than Merkel herself.

Your Friendly Neighborhood Winner

Kramp-Karrenbauer is more “approachable” than the chancellor, according to Eva Quadbeck, journalist and co-author of a rather well-timed biography published in October. “She’s the kind of woman you could have a chat with if you saw her in the supermarket,” she said.

More than this, this Catholic mother-of-three holds all the right values for the CDU: she expressed her opposition to gay marriage in 2015, and is against abolishing the infamous Paragraph 219a from Germany’s criminal code, which forbids advertising abortion. This has already been a source of tension with the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in the government coalition.

In fact, suggested Olaf Boehnke, political analyst at Rasmussen Global, Merkel and AKK may already have agreed to play out a “good-cop, bad-cop” routine. While Merkel concentrates on her international duties and maintains a relatively liberal course to keep her coalition together, Kramp-Karrenbauer, with no seat either in the cabinet or the Bundestag to actually affect government policy, will make all the right conservative noises on domestic issues to keep the party on her side while she awaits her turn.

Kramp-Karrenbauer’s record also suggests she has “more courage to take risks than Merkel,” Quadbeck argued. In 2012, the then newly-appointed Saarland state premier, impatient with infighting in the allied Free Democratic Party (FDP), dissolved her coalition and called an early election, even though polls had the CDU neck-and-neck with the SPD. “Merkel advised her against this, quite vehemently in fact,” Quadbeck said. “But she did it anyway, and won the election.”

To show the boss that this was no fluke, Kramp-Karrenbauer repeated the trick at the next Saarland election in March 2017, trouncing the SPD with a full 40 percent of the vote, a victory that was credited with bringing the campaign train of SPD chancellor-candidate Martin Schulz to a grinding halt. Merkel once again took note, before securing her own victory over the Social Democrats in September.

What Now?

If AKK can help pull the same results off in next autumn’s state elections in eastern Germany, even the CDU’s old-school traditionalists will surely revere her. The AfD is currently claiming close to a quarter of the electorate in Brandenburg, Saxony, and Thuringia. According to Boehnke, that means that Kramp-Karrenbauer will have to prioritize the issues of migration and border controls and look significantly tougher than Merkel.

“She has to shape the profile of the CDU as the one party that is looking for regulation of migration,” said Boehnke. “From a CDU perspective, it’s about limiting the damage of [the refugee influx in] 2015, and trying to win back the supporters who left for the AfD.” For Europe, “that would mean taking all the immigrant quota issues off the agenda.”
“She pretty much backs what Merkel is already doing at a European level,” Boehnke added. “She is definitely a European by passion, but she has to favor the national interest over European interest.”

Kramp-Karrenbauer is already hardening her rhetoric on immigration. She said in November that she would like to see Germany’s rules on dual nationality re-examined—in other words, she would potentially force the grandchildren of immigrants to choose to own one passport only.

Nor is AKK above a bit of the kind of right-wing populism that Merkel has conspicuously avoided: on the campaign trail in November, Kramp-Karrenbauer criticized the fact that some kindergartens had taken to calling traditional children’s St. Martin’s Day processions simply “lantern processions” rather than using the Christian term. “That’s not tolerance, that’s self-diminishment!” she told a local CDU gathering in Berlin, and “no part of her speech got more applause,” DER SPIEGEL reported.

These aren’t necessarily just populist gestures. Indeed, all of Kramp-Karrenbauer’s public statements suggest that, as chancellor, she would steer Germany back onto the pre-Merkel paths that those old CDU conservatives prefer. According to Quadbeck, AKK is “very much in the tradition of Helmut Kohl and his west-orientated world view, while Merkel had adopted a much more multilateral world.”

Ultimately, all this is about securing the future of the CDU, which is currently polling nationally at just under 30 percent. As Boehnke put it: “If Kramp-Karrenbauer can guide the CDU back to 36 percent, she’ll be good to go for the chancellery.”

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© REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch

Long before she entered politics, married, and acquired her tongue-twisting, double-barrel surname, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer’s dream was to be a teacher. Plan B: midwife.

She may need all the skills of those two jobs, and much more besides, if on Friday she becomes the eighth leader of Germany’s center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU).

Everything has come at once for the woman known to all as AKK. And not just for her: ordinary Germans are struggling to understand the 56 year-old who seems to have emerged from nowhere as Angela Merkel’s heir apparent.

And yet her apparent overnight success masks a long climb up the ladder of power. That began with her 1984 election as councilor in her small town home of Püttlingen in Saarland, a tiny southwest German state, on the French border.

Along the way she has bettered CDU grandees, party colleagues, and, when she became the Saarland interior minister in 2000, promoted by state governor Peter Müller, she faced down local police and state prosecutors who openly questioned her authority. Those questions vanished, at the very latest, when she succeeded Müller as governor of Germany’s smallest state.

Taking Nothing For Granted

Eventually she heads to Hamburg leading in opinion polls, with 48 per cent of CDU supporters behind her, AKK is taking nothing for granted.

The new party leader will not be chosen by voters but 1,001 regional party delegates in a secret ballot. No one knows for sure how they will vote and, after an eight-stop tour of the country, AKK knows many are impressed with Friedrich Merz. The 63 year-old is the CDU’s prodigal son, a former deputy leader who clashed with Merkel and left but has returned from the wilderness to succeed her. He is a strong speaker, and doesn’t lack in confidence, while the tiny Ms Kramp-Karrenbauer can struggle to be noticed.

But unlike her main rival she has 18 years of uninterrupted government experience under her belt.

Many analysts have dubbed her Angela Merkel 2.0, given both are women and prefer compromise and ego-free politics. Like Merkel, Kramp-Karrenbauer owes her rise to hard work, being underestimated, and a love of calculated risk. But, from her record, AKK loves risk even more than the outgoing CDU leader.

Risk-Taker

In January 2012, a year after taking over as Saar state premier, she swapped coalition partners in office then called—and won—a snap election. Merkel was annoyed by AKK’s risk-taking but impressed with the results. Last February, Merkel lured her to Berlin as CDU secretary general.

Neither woman mentioned the obvious gravitas of the decision, confidantes say: becoming secretary general—as Merkel did many years before her—is AKK’s best chance to lead the CDU.

If she wins on Friday, analysts may soon spot similarities between the Saarland politician and another CDU leader: the late Helmut Kohl, from neighboring Rhineland-Palatinate. Like him, AKK has a sharp political mind and a knack for wrapping hard political polemic in mild regional German vowels.

That has allowed her both defend and attack the hot button political issue in this leadership race: Merkel’s refugee crisis response of 2015-16, that saw over one million enter Germany.

During the regional road show she backed the Merkel approach at the time, not to close German borders. Yet she has promised regional delegates that criminal asylum seekers should be deported at speed and “never allowed set foot again on European soil”—even if they come from war-torn Syria. Somehow she has managed to do so without being denounced as a populist hardliner.

Similarly, though pitching herself as the centrist continuity candidate, she has made a play for CDU conservatives—attacking liberal abortion laws and standing by remarks likening same-sex marriage to pedophilia and polygamy.

More Emotional, Less Deliberate

For journalist Kristina Dunz, author of the first AKK biography, the politician is a value conservative with a left-wing social policy heart, whose differences to Angela Merkel are more interesting than the similarities.

“She doesn’t wobble in her positions, even when criticized,” said Dunz. “She is more emotional … and not as slow and deliberate as Merkel. She is also more belligerent.”

AKK knows no one would believe her if she distanced herself too much from the woman who promoted her. She promises to keep the chancellor’s conciliatory approach to leadership—finding compromises that make everyone look good—but promises a more dynamic political style.

What will this look like in practice? An end, she vows, to the  “leaden” Merkel era of sitting out decisions or imposing “without alternative” decisions from above.

Instead her CDU will turn grassroots concerns into government policy, she says. As well as more dynamism vertically, she wants a horizontal transformation to re-invigorate the CDU’s various wings—from conservative to centrist—and revive the party’s profile as a catch-all, center-right Volkspartei .

That is the best way to beat back the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and pull back lost CDU voters, she says.

No Moment to Rest

If elected CDU leader on Friday, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer will have no moment to rest. She has to give back hope to the party—struggling on 28 percent in polls and down five points from the 2017 election disaster result.

Beyond revitalizing the party, and preparing it for two difficult state elections next year, she has to accommodate herself with Angela Merkel, who plans to stay on as chancellor until 2021.

Finally, the new CDU leader has to revive a grand coalition lumbering under its own leaden reputation. Its coalition partner, the Social Democrats (SPD), are down to just 17 points in opinion polls and skidding from one identity crisis to the next. After taking six months to get into office, it is far from a given that this government will last the distance. If not, AKK—already thrust into the CDU leadership with little warning—could find herself running for the chancellery sooner than expected.

And, almost without planning it, the Saarland politician could soon find herself at the helm of the EU’s largest and most powerful member state—and effectively heading the bloc itself—in uncertain of times.

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