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Succeeding Merkel: Chancellor’s ally Armin Laschet elected CDU party chief

Armin Laschet, state premier of North Rhine-Westphalia, is the new CDU leader and thereby frontrunner to be the party's candidate to succeed Angela Merkel as German chancellor at September's general election.

Published: 16 January 2021 11:33 CET
Succeeding Merkel: Chancellor's ally Armin Laschet elected CDU party chief
North Rhine-Westphalia's State Premier Armin Laschet delivers a speech after being elected as CDU leader at a digital congress in Berlin on January 16, 2021: AFP

The close Merkel ally, 59, was elected in a digital conference with 521 votes in a run-off against Merkel rival Friedrich Merz, who fetched 466 votes.

A third hopeful, foreign affairs expert Norbert Roettgen, was knocked out of the race.

READ ALSO: CDU leader vote: Who are the three men vying to succeed Merkel?

Merz had campaigned on a promise to shift away from 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”.

In contrast, Laschet pledged to continue with Merkel's more moderate course.

In a speech minutes before the vote on Saturday, Laschet called for “continuity” and highlighted the challenge of retaining CDU voters without Merkel at the top.

“What we need is continuity of success,” he said, in a direct rejection of Merz's vision.

Merz, meanwhile, attempted to address his low levels of support among women in the party by highlighting his good relationship with his wife and daughter — leading to some panning on social media.

“Sure, every heterosexual husband and father is virtually a women's rights movement in their own right,” one Twitter user wrote.

At the opening on Friday of the two-day congress which had been forced online by the pandemic, Merkel had signalled her opposition of Merz as she urged delegates to stay the centrist course.

“As a people's party of the centre, we naturally seek solutions that balance out conflicts and always promote … social cohesion,” she said.

“This has always distinguished us as a governing party,” added Merkel.

Merkel backs 'team'

Giving a further hint of her choice, Merkel said she hoped that “a team will be elected that will take the fate of our proud party in its hands”.

While she did not name names, the call appeared to indicate support for Laschet, who has campaigned on a joint ticket with Health Minister Jens Spahn as his deputy.

Merkel had previously said that Laschet “has the tools” to be chancellor.

READ ALSO: Who is the new head of Germany's conservative CDU party?

Merkel, elected as Germany's youngest and first female chancellor in 2005, is planning to stand down after four terms and 16 years in the job following a general election in September.

She had already given up the party's chairman job in 2018 but her preferred successor Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer was forced to also step down over her handling of a regional election scandal.

The head of the CDU traditionally leads the party into a general election as its chancellor candidate, meaning the winner of Saturday's vote would be in with a good chance of securing the top job.

But the pandemic has reshuffled the cards, and many voices are calling instead for the conservative alliance to field someone else as its chancellor candidate. 

READ MORE: Life after Merkel: Is Germany ready to think about what's next?

Chancellor candidate

Most popular at the moment is CSU leader and Bavarian state premier Markus Soeder, whose robust response to the pandemic has won him widespread praise and given him a national spotlight.

Another contender could be Spahn, who has reportedly been sounding out his chances behind the scenes.

The final race at Merkel's conservative alliance for Germany's top job is therefore far from over ahead of the September 26 elections.

Merkel helped Germany weather storms including the global financial crisis and eurozone turmoil as she shifted her CDU firmly to the political centre.

Support for the chancellor plummeted after Germany kept open its borders in 2015 to a mass influx of refugees, dividing society and leading to the rise of the far right.

But in the twilight of her reign, Merkel's popularity has soared again thanks to her handling of the coronavirus pandemic, making it increasingly difficult for Germans to imagine political life without her.

 

 

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CLIMATE CRISIS

INTERVIEW: ‘Failed climate policies are fuelling far-right politics in Germany’

Alt-right political parties tend to oppose environmental protections, but is there a connection between their political success and climate policy failures? Author and thought-leader Sandrine Dixson-Declève explains why Germany may be having a ‘1930s moment’, and why the next elections are gravely important.

Published: 17 May 2024 15:24 CEST
INTERVIEW: 'Failed climate policies are fuelling far-right politics in Germany'

It’s understood that far-right and populist political parties tend to either downplay the realities of climate change, or block progressive policies that would try to mitigate its impacts. But the link between failed climate policies and the recent rise of populist parties is rarely addressed.

Speaking as a panellist at the Green Tech Festival in Berlin on Thursday, climate policy thought-leader Sandrine Dixson-Declève voiced concern that poor climate and economic policies are fuelling the popularity of far-right politics in Germany and across Europe. 

Co-president of the Club of Rome, Dixson-Declève works to promote policies that she believes would help secure a sustainable future for humanity. Such policies are laid out in the book Earth for All: A Survival Guide for Humanity, that she co-authored.

The Local spoke with Sandrine Dixson-Declève about Germany’s climate policy failures, and why she thinks the upcoming European elections are of the utmost importance.

The shortcomings of Germany’s ‘Energiewende’ had serious political consequences

Having been a contributor and advisor to Germany’s Energiewende (energy transition), Dixson-Declève has followed German politics and environmental policy for years.

“I believe that one of the biggest mistakes was that we politicised energy policy in Germany from the outset,” she told The Local, adding, “Merkel actually accepted the big green push to pull out of nuclear, which actually created a big mess.”

Germany’s anti-nuclear energy movement dates back to the 19070s, and led to the foundation of the Green party. Under Merkel’s leadership, a plan was adopted to phase out nuclear power with the last three nuclear power plants taken offline in 2023.

But losing nuclear power as an energy source came with some serious consequences.

“The first big mess was the continued burning of coal,” Dixson-Declève explained. “The second big mess was Nord Stream 2, and that led to the invasion of Ukraine…because it gave Putin power.”

Still, she wouldn’t suggest that Germany try to revive its nuclear power now: “I believe that Germany needs to really think through the next steps.”

READ ALSO: ‘Nuclear power is a dead horse in Germany’: Scholz rejects reopening plants 

Protestors run past riot police

A wave of protestors break through police lines at Lützerath. Open pit coal mining in west Germany destroyed most of the Hambach Forest, as well as dozens of villages such as Lützerath. At both sites massive citizen protests were met with brutal police evictions. Photo by Paul Krantz.

Energy efficiency is the missing piece to Germany’s climate plans

How to build up renewable energy infrastructure is at the centre of most discourse around curbing fossil fuel use, but using the energy we have more efficiently arguably deserves more immediate attention.

“The other missing link, which no one talks about, is energy efficiency,” Dixson-Declève said. “Actually the best energy is the energy you don’t use. That is unsexy, and that is why energy efficiency hasn’t been taken up the way it should have been since 2010.”

While working on climate and energy plans in 2010, she says she came across a study that said Europe could wean itself off of Russian gas just by putting energy efficiency requirements in place for buildings.

In 2022 the European Commission finally began to take this idea seriously when Germany and Europe suddenly needed to replace Russian gas imports, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Another massive energy saver that has been politicised for all the wrong reasons in Germany is heat pumps.

According to Eurostat data, about half of all energy consumed in the EU is used for heating and cooling, and most of that energy comes from fossil fuels. Heat pumps are significantly more efficient than boilers and allow for greater use of renewable energy sources.

But when Economy Minister Robert Habeck led an effort to promote heat pumps by banning new fossil-powered heating systems, conservative and far-right parties jumped on the issue as if it were an attack on personal freedoms. 

“As environmentalists, we need to get better at translating the environmental narrative into something that resonates with people,” said Dixson-Declève. 

READ ALSO: Reader question – How do I install a heat pump in my German property?

A unified coalition government that is serious about climate protections might have better communicated to people that heat pumps would ultimately save them money: “They should have been enabled in a way that truly assisted people in getting the heat that they needed in an affordable way at the right time.”

‘I am very scared we are in a 1930s moment’

Whereas the coalition government has largely failed to communicate to voters how environmental policies will improve their lives and save them money, conservative and far-right parties have done extremely well at hijacking the narrative. 

The European People’s Party (EPP – the EU’s largest conservative party), for example, is particularly adept at using citizens’ economic concerns to block environmental policies.

Having analysed the EPP’s manifestos, Dixson-Declève notes that they acknowledge the need to mitigate climate change, but say that protections cannot cost. 

“I think the EPP has done a very good job both of putting in fear of the greens, [as if] they’re only going to think about green climate policies and not about social policies [whereas] we’re here to think about you.”

Sandrine Dixson-Declève with Earth for All

Sandrine Dixson-Declève holds up a copy of the book ‘Earth for All’ alongside two of the book’s co-authors. Photo: picture alliance/dpa | Wolfgang Kumm

Germany’s far-right parties tend to use similar messaging to try and convince voters that they will better improve the lives of citizens than the current coalition parties have. 

READ ALSO: Why are the far-right AfD doing so well in German polls?

Nearly 100 years ago, the National Socialist (Nazi) party succeeded in drumming up major support along similar lines.

Speaking as a panellist at Berlin’s Green Tech Festival, when asked how she thought European politicians were doing on climate issues, Dixson-Declève described them as deer in the headlights, adding, “I am very scared we are in a 1930s moment”.

“I think that in the 1930s we didn’t see Hitler coming, we didn’t read the tea leaves,” she told The Local, adding that in the present moment, “people are suffering. When people suffer, they look to anything, any message that’s going to make them feel like that next leader is going to help them.” 

She also suggests that we can’t count on the youth vote to save us, citing Argentina and Portugal as two places where young voters have actually pushed politics to the right recently.

READ ALSO: A fight for the youth vote: Are German politicians social media savvy enough?

“This is a tipping moment politically, and if we’re not careful, it could explode in our faces,” said Dixson-Declève. “We need to get as many people to vote this year [as possible]. It’s an absolutely fundamental vote, alongside the United States, in order to make sure that we don’t slide to the right across Europe.”

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