Conservatives mull Merkel succession
BERLIN: With less than six months to go until a general election and their poll ratings plummeting, Angela Merkel’s conservatives were meeting for crunch talks yesterday as pressure builds to pick their chancellor candidate. Longtime Merkel ally Armin Laschet, 60, took over as leader of the chancellor’s CDU party in January, and would normally be first choice to lead the CDU and its Bavarian affiliate CSU into the elections on September 26.
Yet as the conservatives’ poll ratings plummet over their recent handling of the coronavirus crisis, some are calling for Laschet to step aside in favor of the more charismatic CSU leader Markus Soeder, 54. After several rounds of shadow boxing on talk shows and in the press, the two men will have the chance to stake their claims when they each deliver a speech to conservative lawmakers yesterday.
Though neither Laschet nor Soeder has officially announced their candidacy, Bild newspaper declared yesterday’s meeting “the weekend of truth” in the race to succeed Merkel. A final decision was not expected yesterday , but CSU parliamentary leader Alexander Dobrindt told reporters ahead of the meeting that the moment of truth would come “in the next two weeks”. “We have a great interest in the whole thing moving ahead quickly now,” his CDU counterpart Ralph Brinkhaus added, noting that the first step was to talk with the two party leaders about “how we can forge a path in the future”.
Popularity contest
In an interview with weekly Bild am Sonntag, Laschet also called for a quick decision given “the mood across the CDU”. “Unity is very important. It would do the CDU and
CSU a lot of good to make the decision together. And very promptly,” he said. The candidate will most likely be picked behind closed doors, with Laschet telling broadcaster ZDF that the conservatives would choose whoever “best suited our election program”.
Yet in an interview with Spiegel magazine on Wednesday, Soeder insisted that the candidate needed to be “accepted by the whole population, not just the party”. The Star Trek fan and fancy-dress loving Bavarian consistently beats Laschet in popularity polls, with a recent survey by public broadcaster ARD showing that 54 percent of Germans thought Soeder would be a good candidate, compared to just 19 percent for Laschet. As leaders of Germany’s biggest federal states by population and area respectively, North-Rhine Westphalia premier Laschet and Bavarian chief Soeder have also exchanged blows over their leadership in the pandemic. —AFP