Mini-Merkel’s Mega Meltdown German conservatives head for a welcome new leadership race.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/mini-merkels-mega-meltdown-11581380318?mod=opinion_lead_pos3
German politics was thrown into new turmoil Monday when Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, leader of the center-right Christian Democratic Union, announced she won’t run for Chancellor next year. The defense minister, known as AKK, was Chancellor Angela Merkel’s preferred successor.
The final straw for Ms. Kramp-Karrenbauer and her critics was a conflict with the CDU’s local branch in Thuringia in the former East Germany. State elections there in October were inconclusive, as has become the norm in Germany. The CDU and center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) hemorrhaged votes while the neo-communist Left and far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) surged. After months of negotiations, local CDU leaders agreed to cooperate with the AfD and the free-market Free Democratic Party to form a state government—defying Mrs. Merkel and Ms. Kramp-Karrenbauer’s blanket ban on CDU alliances with the AfD.
Yet Ms. Kramp-Karrenbauer—called “mini Merkel” for her close relationship with Germany’s long-time leader—never enjoyed full control of the party. Her selection as leader in late 2018 represented an attempt to suppress debate within the party by rejecting the free-market convictions of Friedrich Merz or the more assertive tone on cultural issues from Jens Spahn, both of whom challenged AKK.
That debate hasn’t disappeared, and now voters also are confused about what the CDU stands for or whether the party can respond to their concerns. In addition to Thuringia, state elections in Saxony and Brandenburg have been disasters for the CDU on Ms. Kramp-Karrenbauer’s watch.
AKK’s critics within her party fret that this is clearing an electoral path for the AfD, which combines scattershot economic populism with nationalism that many Germans find troubling in light of the country’s history. Those worries are probably overblown since AfD still struggles to expand its support outside the states of the former East Germany. But a different electoral threat to the CDU is emerging from the center-left Greens, who appeal to a desire for a mainstream alternative to Mrs. Merkel’s suffocating centrism.
Voters everywhere want politicians who stand for something other than anything or nothing. As Mrs. Merkel’s long tenure winds down, German voters appear to be tiring of her woolly consensus politics and the grand left-right coalitions with the SPD by which she has governed for most of her time in power. Her party missed its chance in 2018 to give voters an alternative. Now it has another.
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