Coronavirus crisis creates frontrunners in race to succeed Merkel

Germany took further steps this week towards easing the tough restrictions on public life imposed following the coronavirus crisis. But what impact will the global health emergency have on the battle to take over from Angela Merkel?

Berlin (dpa) – The scale of the social and economic fallout from the coronavirus crisis could take months to emerge. But the global pandemic already seems to have reshaped the race to succeed Angela Merkel.

Three of the figures at the centre of the crisis in Germany – Health Minister Jens Spahn as well as two state premiers Markus Soeder and Armin Laschet – are also leading candidates to take over from the 65-year-old Merkel, who is due to step down as chancellor before next year’s national election.

The result of the crisis has been to dramatically raise the public profiles of Soeder and Laschet, who head up the two states worst affected by the crisis – Bavaria and North Rhine Westphalia respectively.

And according to Manuel Becker, University of Bonn professor of politics, it gives them for the moment frontrunner status to replace Merkel. The 39-year-old Spahn is Laschet’s running mate.

Meanwhile, the country’s focus on the pandemic has also pushed to the sidelines the two other candidates in the battle to succeed Merkel – Fredrich Merz, a former heavyweight in the chancellor’s conservative Christian Democrats (CDU), and a CDU foreign affairs expert Norbert Roettgen.

But how the crisis will unfold in the months leading up to the December CDU party conference when the leadership issue is due to be settled is anyone’s guess. “The situation could change very rapidly,” said Becker.

The campaign for Merkel’s job has essentially been on hold since the pandemic hit Germany in January when the first recorded case of the virus was reported.

Since then, the number of registered cases in the nation has surged to 166,000 as of Thursday, according to Berlin’s Robert Koch Institute with 140,000 having recovered from the illness and 7,119 having died.

But with the candidates divided on whether to adopt a cautious approach to further opening up the economy or speeding up the process, victory in the Merkel succession battle might come down to the one who saw the best way out of the restrictions.

With the number of new infections falling, Germany took further steps this week to ease the tough restrictions imposed in March, which have pushed the nation’s economy into a downturn of historic proportions.

Opinion polls initially showed Soeder as gaining high praise from voters for his very cautious approach to ending the constraints.

“But of course there is no all-clear,” Soeder told German public TV on Wednesday, echoing his earlier cautious line. He also warned that the resumption of football matches could only be held under rigorous conditions.

Last month, a voter survey drawn up by the Civey research group for the weekly Spiegel news magazine found 46 per cent of Germans backed the 53-year-old Soeder as the chancellor candidate to head up Merkel’s conservative bloc at next year’s election.

Laschet has, however, led the charge for a quick end to the constraints, arguing that they were damaging to both the nation’s social and economic fabric, which also helped to mark him out from Merkel, who has been very wary of ending the restrictions.

The 59-year-old Laschet even went as far as to attack the nation’s virologists in a much-criticised TV appearance. Laschet only scored 9 per cent in the Civey poll.

But as head of the Christian Social Union (CSU), the CDU’s Bavarian-based allies, Becker believes it would be difficult to imagine Soeder securing the prize of running for the chancellorship.

This would only be the third time that a CSU candidate has headed up the CDU-CSU ticket in a national election.

The two previous CSU chancellor candidates – former Bavarian premiers Franz Josef Strauss and Edmund Stoiber – failed in their national election bids.

Soeder also himself admitted before the crisis that the CDU party chief’s job and the chancellor-candidate post should not be separated.

Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer is the current party leader after Merkel stepped down from that role in a bid to groom her successor. But Kramp-Karrenbauer announced she was resigning in February after a series of missteps and the vote to replace her has been delayed by the coronavirus outbreak.

With the economic consequences of the crisis now likely to be front and centre of political life, the 64-year-old Merz might be able to mount a political comeback in the race.

Popular with the CDU’s more conservative members, Merz is the former German head of the US fund manager Blackrock and consequently enjoys a measure of respect among voters for his business background.

Merz also has a unique qualification for the chancellor’s job. He is the only candidate who has so far tested positive for the virus.