“I am firmly convinced that both belong in one hand: party chairmanship and chancellery,” he told the “Tagesspiegel” (Sunday). “That has not been the case for almost three years, and that is why there is no official bonus. On the contrary.” Several prominent CDU politicians must tremble about their direct mandates in the election.
After the poor performance of the CDU and CSU in the state elections in Bavaria and Hesse in autumn 2018, Merkel announced that she would no longer run for the office of CDU chairman. She kept the office of Chancellor, but at the same time announced that she would not run for it again.
If today’s CDU boss and Union Chancellor candidate Armin Laschet stands “next to the long-standing successful Chancellor”, he can neither say in the election campaign, “We are doing everything new,” nor “we are just going to keep going”, Schuble described the current situation. After 16 years as Merkel’s chancellor, this is “a problem” for his party and “may not be understood by everyone,” said the Bundestag President and former CDU leader.
Like Schuble, the CDU politician Friedrich Merz had recently made a statement. “Almost three years have passed since Ms. Merkel announced in October 2018 that she would no longer run for chairmanship,” he told the “Augsburger Allgemeine”. “This time has not gone well enough for the CDU in terms of content and concept.”
Schuble had supported Laschet in the internal power struggle for the candidacy for chancellor. In current surveys, the Union is about three to five percentage points behind the Social Democrats (SPD) in second place. On the question of who the eligible voters prefer to shen in the Chancellery, Laschet is clearly behind the SPD Chancellor candidate Olaf Scholz and partly behind the Green Chancellor candidate Annalena Baerbock.
According to a report, several prominent CDU politicians must tremble over their direct mandates in the federal election. Among others, Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, Economics Minister Peter Altmaier and Agriculture Minister Julia Klckner are not in first place in their constituencies in current projections, as reported by the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung”. It relies on data collected by the analysis firms Wahlkreisprennose and Election. Also affected are CDU General Secretary Paul Ziemiak, Minister of State for Culture Monika Grtters, the Commissioner for Integration Annette Widmann-Mauz, the domestic political spokesman for the Union faction, Mathias Middelberg, and the CDU top candidate in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Philipp Amthor, as the newspaper continued to write. The reason is the general weakness of the Union in the polls.
Most prominent Union politicians, however, are covered by their national lists, wrote the newspaper. You would thus move into the Bundestag even without a direct mandate. Even several CDU politicians who are applying for the Bundestag for the first time would not win a direct mandate according to the projections. This included the chairman of the Junge Union, Tilman Kuban, the former President of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution Hans-Georg Maaen and CDU federal board member Serap Gler.
According to the analysis firm Election, the CDU and CSU lose a total of 29 direct mandates with a probability of at least 85 percent, as the “FAS” reported. Most of them went to the SPD, in Baden-Wrttemberg some to the Greens, in Saxony to the AfD. With dozens of other mandates there is also the risk of loss, but with less probability.
