Merkel’s future is in the hands of a 28-year old named Kevin
GERMANY - German Chancellor Angela Merkel is hoping for another term after more than a decade in power, but she’ll have to get past one major obstacle: a sneaker-wearing 28-year-old named Kevin Kuehnert.
Kuehnert is the millennial behind the NoGroKo campaign, short for No Grand Coalition, which has turned Germany’s normally staid politics upside down. Thanks to Kuehnert, Merkel’s proposed coalition government between her conservative party and the Social Democrats (SPD) now hangs on a yes or no vote by the SPD’s rank and file. More than 400,000 are casting ballots in a postal vote and the results will be announced on Sunday.
“We cannot continue like this: the cozy politics represented by Angela Merkel which does not decide anything,” he told CNN. “This is now, slowly, ending. This debate is now breaking through in my own party and I believe in society.” A “Yes” vote would mean Merkel can breathe a sigh of relief and get back to running the country with the coalition government safely in place. A “No” vote would mean Merkel must scrap the coalition and either take her chances with a minority government or face new elections.
Kuehnert has done all this in his spare time for no pay within three short months of being elected as the SPD youth leader. “No, I don’t have a chauffeur who drives me around,” Kuehnert said, comparing himself to other full-time politicians, “but I basically do the same as any other politician in Germany -- only that I do it in my free time.”
Germany’s September 2017 election was supposed to be an easy victory for Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU), and she was expected to cruise to her fourth term in office as Chancellor. Instead, voters revolted against the status quo. Both CDU and the SPD barely maintained their status as Germany’s top parties, suffering record losses and losing millions of votes to the far-right nationalist party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), which took nearly 13% of the vote.
(CNN)