With less than six months to go until a general election and their poll ratings plummeting, Angela Merkel’s conservatives are meeting for crunch talks Sunday as pressure builds to pick their chancellor candidate.
Long-time Merkel ally Armin Laschet, 60, took over as leader of the chancellor’s CDU party in January, and would normally be first choice to lead the CDU and its Bavarian affiliate CSU into the elections on September 26.
Yet as the conservatives’ poll ratings plummet over their recent handling of the coronavirus crisis, some are calling for Laschet to step aside in favour of the more charismatic CSU leader Markus Soeder, 54.
After several rounds of shadow boxing on talk shows and in the press, the two men will have the chance to stake their claims when they each deliver a speech to conservative lawmakers on Sunday.
Though neither Laschet nor Soeder has officially announced their candidacy, Bild newspaper declared Sunday’s meeting “the weekend of truth” in the race to succeed Merkel.
While a final choice of candidate is not expected immediately, conservative parliamentary leader Ralph Brinkhaus called Friday for a decision to be made “in the next two weeks.”
