In the end, somewhat surprisingly, Armin Laschet prevailed: it will be he, the governor of North Rhine-Westphalia, the largest Land in Germany, who will succeed Angela Merkel at the helm of the CDU party and perhaps, who knows, also the position of Chancellor. Laschet was not the favorite on the eve, even if the gap in the polls with the other two CDU presidential candidates was minimal: the favorite was the financier (formerly BlackRcok) Friedrich Merz, then there was also Norbert Röttgen. In all three cases, the appointment would have been more or less in continuity with the cumbersome legacy left by Frau Angela, but the candidate closest to her was precisely Laschet, a 59-year-old who was also an MEP in the past.
His victory repositions the party firmly in the center, in the footsteps traced by Merkel for several decades, giving a clear signal of continuity: the CDU delegates preferred to choose a very little charismatic leader, as he himself admits (“Maybe I'm not a stage animal, but I'm Armin Laschet, and you can count on me”) in order to curb the rightward drift that the he would have taken a side, for example, relying on the much more unscrupulous Merz, who by virtue of a still good result (Laschet won only with 52%) has already asked for the Ministry of Economy for the last part of the legislature. Laschet is therefore an iron Merkelian, but above all a convinced pro-European and an advocate of the soft line on the issue of migrants, to the point that in his region he is nicknamed "Armin the Turk".
These characteristics, which led him to lead the party, could however cost him the prospect of also taking over Angela Merkel's other legacy: that of Chancellor. In the saddle continuously since 2005, Merkel has already said for some time that she will not run again in the federal elections in September. However, this does not mean that the candidate of the centre-right coalition is automatically the leader of the CDU, i.e. Lascher. Indeed, the quotations of the leader of the other party of the current majority are rising more and more, the CSU, led by the Bavarian Markus Soeder, who enjoys far more brilliant polls than Lascher. The match will be decided in the spring, when the regional teams will be in Bavaria which should confirm Soeder's leadership and launch him to the Chancellorship.
