This weekend, the CDU Party will hold the internal election of who becomes the next head of the party.....thus becoming the prime candidate to be Chancellor after Merkel retires in 2021.
What is shaping up? Basically.....while three are in the running, you can readily dismiss Jens Spahn (mostly because of his youth). I don't think he'll raise more than 10-percent of the vote.
There are to be 1,001 members at this Hamburg meeting, who will each have a vote.
The two prime runners now? Friedrich Merz and Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer (often referred to by journalists as AKK).
There are two camps running this election. The first camp is the Merkel-group, who want AKK as their chosen leader. Most German journalists will say that AKK is a carbon-copy of Merkel and if you were happy with the way things run.....then you can only get that future with AKK.
The second group is the Bundestag President Wolfgang Schäuble group.....who are mostly over the age of forty, and have a memory of how things were before Merkel. This group prefers Friedrich Merz.
Right now the odds? Last weekend, BILD (the national newspaper) went and attempted chats with the thousand members who will be at the conference. Only about a quarter of them were willing to discuss the matter....with most (3 to 2) preferring Merz.
My humble opinion? If AKK is the winner, I think the German Green Party has an absolute chance in 2021 to defeat AKK and the CDU Party....at a heavy cost to the SPD Party. If Merz is the winner, some enthusiasm might be found and the CDU might go back to 40-percent numbers like they've done twenty years ago.
And Spahn? I think if AKK moves up a notch....Spahn ends up as the General Secretary of the Party. He'll sit there for seven or more years....chilling out and gaining support.
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