Merkel’s party picks her ally as next leader
BERLIN: Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative CDU party picked her ally Armin Laschet as its next leader on Saturday, in a vote for “continuity” as Europe’s biggest economy heads into a key election year with the deadly coronavirus pandemic still raging.
In the close race, Mr Laschet, the state premier of North Rhine-Westphalia, triumphed over old Merkel nemesis Friedrich Merz. A third hopeful was knocked out of the race.
Mr Merz had campaigned on a promise to shift away from Ms Merkel’s centrist path and steer right, writing in a column for Der Spiegel that a “happy ‘carry on like this’ is just as inappropriate as the vague claim to occupy the centre at all times”.
But delegates at the congress, pushed online because of the pandemic, were not swayed by the 65-year-old corporate lawyer.
Instead, they gave a late victory to Mr Laschet, who pledged to continue with Ms Merkel’s more moderate course.
In a speech minutes before the Saturday vote, he called for “continuity” and highlighted the challenge of retaining voters without Ms Merkel at the top.
“What we need is continuity of success,” he said, in a direct rejection of Mr Merz’s vision.
“I keep hearing the phrase, ‘You have to be prepared to polarise.’ I say, no, you don’t have to. Polarising is easy, anyone can do it,” he said, adding that he wants to “integrate, hold society together”.
Mr Laschet had been trailing in surveys in the run-up to the vote, but his promise to stay the course has struck a chord with a party keen not to rock the boat further in a year already filled with ructions like the pandemic.
The 59-year-old is a soft-spoken political moderate with a reputation for pragmatism, and a sworn Merkel loyalist who famously stuck by the chancellor in 2015, when Germany opened its borders to hundreds of thousands of people fleeing Syria and other hotspots.
At the opening on Friday of the twoday congress, Ms Merkel had signalled her opposition to Mr Merz as she urged delegates to stay the centrist course.
Undeterred by the loss, Mr Merz tweeted that he had extended an offer to Mr Laschet to enter the current government as finance minister.
But he immediately earned a new rebuff from Ms Merkel, with a government spokesman telling AFP there were “no plans for a reshuffle”.