FRIEDRICH MERZ is doing it, and I’m fine with that.” This brief statement by Markus Söder, the head of Bavaria’s governing Christian Social Union (CSU), was enough to confirm what had long been clear in German political circles: that Mr Merz, leader of the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the CSU’s larger sibling, would be the parties’ joint candidate at next year’s federal election. Mr Merz will thus lead the opposition conservatives’ bid to unseat Olaf Scholz, the Social Democratic (SPD) chancellor.
Yes, please no 16 years of CDU again 😭
Demographics and the so-called centre-left parties are working against us here. But the CDU is also working hard to ensure that we’ll have a much bigger problem than themselves, the Nazis of the AfD, within a much shorter time than 16 years.