AKK: the inside story on the woman who could be Germany’s next leader
Annegret Kramp-karrenbauer’s appetite for risk has taken her from provincial politics to the heart of power
On the evening of Tuesday July 16, the inner circle of Germany’s Christian Democrats dialled into a conference call hosted by party boss Annegret Kramp-karrenbauer. She had some surprising news. She was, she told them, the country’s new defence minister.
There was stunned silence. Kramp-karrenbauer, who was only elected as leader of the centreright CDU party last December, had insisted she had no interest in a cabinet job — and everyone believed her. Over and over again, she’d made it clear that her main priority was to renew and reform a party that had been ruled for the previous 18 years by the same woman — Angela Merkel.
Political ambition drove her changeofheart.kramp-karrenbauer, who is known in Germany as AKK, has made no secret of her desire to become Germany’s next chancellor. Replacing Merkel as CDU boss was supposedtobetheidealspringboard. But her performance in the post to datehasbeensowidelycriticisedthat it was time for a rethink.
Her only hope of succeeding Merkel in the top job was to go back on her word and enter the cabinet. And when Ursula von der Leyen, the serving defence minister, was elected European Commission president last month, she took action. As one member of the CDU’S ruling executive says: “It is basically her last chance.”
Kramp-karrenbauer’s fate matters because the race to replace Merkel, Germany’s chancellor since 2005, is no purely domestic affair. In a political scene roiled by Donald Trump, Brexit and the march of European populism, Merkel has long been seen as a beacon of stability and a symbol of a rule-based, multilateral system that is under attack on all fronts. When she leaves the political stage, whoever supplants her will be viewed as the de facto leader of the liberal west.
Kramp-karrenbauer remains a top contender. But her latest career move is a big gamble. The defence ministry has destroyed so many political careers in Germany it is nicknamed the “ejector seat”. Only one previous defence minister — Helmut Schmidt — went on to become chancellor. “It’s a huge risk for AKK,” says one CDU MP who declines to be named. “Defence ministers here always seem to get embroiled in scandals that are not even of their own making: will she be any exception?”
Yet Kramp-karrenbauer prides herself on being willing to take chances. In conversation, the 56-year-old likens herself to a tightrope walker without a safety net. And a glance at her CV reveals a rare capacity for risk. It has been perhaps the defining feature of her career.
In 2012, when she was prime minister of the small western state of Saarland, she shocked voters by pulling the plug on her governing coalition and calling snap elections. The bet paid off when she won. After the general election in 2017, she took another chance, abandoning Saarland for Berlin to begin a new career as secretarygeneral of the CDU.
It was a major demotion, but it showed she had her eyes on a much bigger prize: after all, Merkel had once occupied the same lowly post. Then, in December 2018, came the biggest gamble of all — her campaign to succeed Merkel as leader of the CDU. Defeat would have left her without a job, consigned to political oblivion. Instead she came out on top, narrowly beating Friedrich Merz, a millionaire lawyer loved by the CDU’S conservative wing.
Her move to the defence ministry is only the latest in a series of calculated gambits that have catapulted a provincial politician from the fringes of Germany to the heart of power in Berlin.
Yet unless her standing with the German public radically improves, the job of chancellor could prove forever beyond her grasp. “The impression is being formed among voters that she is not suited to be chancellor, and that is a huge problem for us,” says one CDU MP. “Because there is no obvious replacement for her.”
Ask those in Berlin when doubts about Kramp-karrenbauer first set in, and a number will point to the press conference she held after the European Parliament elections in May. They had been her first big test since taking up the reins of the CDU, and the consensus was that she had failed it: the party won only 22.6 per cent of the vote, its worst performance in a national poll.
It was a humiliating moment for a party that has governed Germany for 50 of the past 70 years and produced some of the country’s most famous postwar chancellors — Konrad Adenauer, Helmut Kohl and Merkel herself. But the result perfectly reflected the current state of a political organisation that is deeply insecure and engaged in an agonising debate about its future direction. It is being squeezed between two rivals, the nationalist Alternative for Germany (AFD) on the right and the Greens on the left, while its junior partner in government, the Social Democrats, languishes in an existential crisis.
Hailed as a new broom last December, Kramp-karrenbauer has failed to achieve a clean sweep. Addressing the press after the European elections, she acknowledged the CDU had “lost massively among young voters”. Polling data showed only 11 per cent of 18to 24-year-olds voted Christian Democrat, an alarming harbinger of the party’s future in a changing political landscape.
In the run-up to the poll, the CDU leader herself had upset this demographic by criticising the “Fridays for Future” demonstrations — she said young people shouldn’t bunk off school to protest against global warming, but do it in their own time. The party also backed a sweeping EU reform of copyright law that digital natives said would prevent them freely uploading material to the internet.