Who will be the CDU chancellor candidate?
This is a five minute read
Four Things
NATO’s common defence pact is built of a principle of unus pro omnibus, omnes pro uno, but it was once again apparent this week that there is only one country whose voice is of any consequence. On Wednesday, President Biden announced that the remaining 3,000 US troops would leave Afghanistan by September 11th despite the fact that no progress has been made in peace talks between NATOs Afghan allies and the Taliban. Germany has previously appealed for NATO not to leave the central Asian state with a power vacuum, one likely to be filled by the reactionary Islamist movement which was removed from power two decades ago. But on Wednesday evening the rest of the NATO states had little choice but to shrug their shoulders and agree to pull their own troops out of the country. While the US only provides around a third of the mission’s manpower, their aerial supplies are indispensable to the other armies. Speaking after the NATO summit, Foreign Minister Heiko Maas did his best impression of someone who had any say in the decision. “This is a decision that was taken by all the NATO members after consultations with the US,” he assured the ARD news anchor even as he struggled to get the word Beratungen out of his mouth.
The Achilles heel of Germany’s green energy revolution has always been an inability to compensate for fluctuations in wind speed and sun shine One way of masking this weakness is storing excess electricity generated during good weather conditions in batteries. While such technology is still mainly in the R&D stage, as of last week Germany has a fairly large new battery - it’s called Norway. The 600-kilometre NordLink cable that runs under the North Sea between Schleswig Holstein and the town of Tonstad can send a nuclear power plant’s worth of electricity in either direction. So, if the wind is blowing on the north German coast, excess production can be sent up onto the Norwegian grid. Similarly, when the north German wind turbines aren’t turning, electricity will be sent south from Norway's hydro schemes. The “green cable” as it's being called is no golden bullet. Germany’s Energiewende is still beset by a number of problems including the delayed completion of the sister cable SuedLink, which is meant to carry power from the windy north to the industrial south, but has been held up by countryside resistance against pylons.
Berlin’s rental cap law has been overturned by the Federal Constitutional Court, which ruled that the city government didn’t have the authority to meddle with rents, which has been a federal prerogative since 2015. The ruling calls into question the competence of the Berlin government just five months ahead of city elections… not that such a reputation has ever unduly burdened Berlin governments in the past. We have reported on a couple of occasions on what a self-defeating project Berlin’s rent cap was. Not only did it cut living costs for wealthy tenants, it led to a collapse in the rental market while driving up prices just outside the city limits. Millions of Berliners are now likely to receive demands for arrears payments. although one major property owner - Venovia - was feeling giddy enough on Thursday to announce that it will forgo arrears payments.
Angela Merkel’s government has published the draft of its updated disease control law. There is nothing new in the legislation - it limits personal contacts, creates curfews, and closes business if a district surpasses a 7-day incidence of 100 cases per 100,000 inhabitants. What is new is that it transfers oversight of these rules from the state up to the federal level. There are a couple of things to note about the law: its origins lie in a prognosis published in mid-March by the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), which predicted a 7-day incidence of 350 cases per 100,000 inhabitants by April 12th if drastic action wasn’t taken. Despite the government’s failure to enforce a national lockdown in the weeks since, the actual 7-day incidence on April 12th stood at under half of the RKI’s prediction (at 136). The fact that the doomsday prophecy hasn’t been fulfilled explains why states have been reluctant to impose new punitive measures on their populations. Secondly, by the time the new law has gone through the Bundestag, the earliest it can come into effect is April 27th. Given how quickly this seasonal virus went into retreat in the second half of April last year, will Ms Merkel ever get to pull her beloved emergency brake?
Everyone’s a loser
Last Sunday, Bavarian prime minister and almighty leader of the CSU, Markus Söder, made official what was until then Germany’s worst kept secret - that he has ambitions to become the next Bundeskanzler.
He positioned his ambition as “an offer” to the larger sister party, the CDU, whose chairman Armin Laschet is struggling in the polls.
But what the hard-charging populist (the Financial Times’ words, not mine…) thought was an offer the CDU couldn’t refuse - a chance to ride his popularity right into the Bundeskanzleramt - was promptly turned down by the CDU executive board.
The CDU board stopped short of formally declaring that Mr Laschet, an Aachen-born Catholic miner’s son, was their man for the Chancellorship, but the statement of support should have been enough to deter the advances of the Nürnberg stonemason’s son. Mr Söder had after all stated that he’d happily stay in Bavaria should the CDU grandees decide to back Mr Laschet.
But he didn’t step aside.
Asked at a press conference if he was breaking his word, his answer was simple.
“Nö.”
And so began a tug-of-war with both candidates promising that they are the best of friends, that there’s great unity, and that they’ll make an amicable, mutual decision soon. Five days later there’s still no decision. Next Monday, the Greens will quietly and orderly present their Chancellor candidate. Even if the Christian Democrats have made a decision by then, the damage is done. Infighting seldom goes down well with the electorate.
Markus Söder’s argument is simple. The two parties stand a better chance at the polls with him at the helm. Armin Laschet’s already weak popularity has dwindled further after a couple of recent media gaffes.
His proposal of a Brückenlockdown (bridging lockdown) was ridiculed by almost everyone as a panicked and late attempt to package a good ol’ lockdown as something new. A proposal lacking in key detail like an end date, Mr Laschet’s bridge to nowhere left him looking like a fool.
A few days later, in an appearance on the political talk show Markus Lanz, Mr Laschet was, according to der Spiegel, “hunted down by the host like a disoriented bull fleeing a matador.”
Ruthless as Mr Lanz undoubtedly was, the TV entertainer is nothing compared to what a Bundeskanzler has to face. No wonder der Spiegel called poor Mr Laschet “Chief Wirdsonix” and compared him to the weak leader of Asterix and Obelix’s Gaulish village.
Whatever Mr Laschet’s failings, Mr Söder’s leadership ambitions still risk seriously destabilizing the conservatives ahead of the election. The CDU grandees had to rally around Mr Laschet. Not doing so would likely mean that the second chairperson in two years would end up throwing in the towel. The party would go into the election leaderless and facing open warfare between centrists and conservatives.
The situation is different to the other two times when the CDU took a step back to let a Bavarian lead them into battle. When Ernst Albrecht drew the shorter straw against Franz Josef Strauss in 1980, and when Edmund Stoiber elbowed his way past Angela Merkel in 2002, the CSU-men both had the backing of several CDU state leaders.
No one has spoken out in favour of Markus Söder.
It is a fact that the big Bavarian has stronger support among ordinary parliamentarians, in particular in the more conservative East, where they think they stand a better chance of keeping their seats with a classic alpha male leading the way. And for every day that Markus Söder doesn’t throw his weight behind Mr Laschet, more local CDU chapters will likely start to switch allegiances.
While the party leadership continues to stand firmly behind Armin Laschet, the CDU’s disintegration in front of running cameras, in an election year, in the middle of a pandemic, will just continue.
Now that the CDU is back to its pre-pandemic demise, magnetically drawn towards the same fate as Germany’s other Volkspartei the SPD, just a bit slower, it’s unfathomable that they cannot settle on a candidate, let alone on a process to decide on one.
Maybe they should just decide that no one runs at all… After 16 years of power a spell in opposition might provide necessary rejuvenation…
A.B.B.
Who we are:
Jörg Luyken: Journalist based in Berlin since 2014. His work has been published by German and English outlets including der Spiegel, die Welt, the Daily Telegraph. Formerly in the Middle East. Classicist; Masters in International Politics & Arabic from St Andrews.
Axel Bard Bringéus: Started his career as a journalist for the leading Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet and has spent the last decade in senior roles at Spotify and as a venture capital investor. In Berlin since 2011.