Recent surveys showed around 48 percent of the CDU voters backed Merkel loyalist Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer for the leadership, while 35 percent supported Friedrich Merz, an outspoken critic of Merkel\u2019s refugee policy.<\/p>\n
It was not clear how the electorate\u2019s choice would be reflected in the decision of 1,001 delegates, who will gather in Hamburg to elect the new party chair.<\/p>\n
Parliament speaker Wolfgang Schaeuble, one of Germany’s most powerful politicians, announced his support for Merz, in an interview with Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Several other key figures of the CDU, including EU Commissioner Guenther Oettinger, also backed Merz for the CDU leadership.<\/p>\n
The 62-year-old candidate, branded by critics as \u201cTrump light,\u201d had challenged Merkel in 2002, but lost the power struggle, and later withdrew from politics in 2009.<\/p>\n
Merkel\u2019s right-hand man, Economy Minister Peter Altmaier said on Thursday that he would support Kramp-Karrenbauer, as she would be the best candidate to lead the CDU.<\/p>\n
56-year-old Kramp-Karrenbauer was the premier of the southwestern German state of Saarland from 2011 ahd 2018, and in February this year she was promoted to CDU secretary-general.<\/p>\n
Merkel, who led the Christian Democrats for 18 years, announced in October that she will not run for the chair again amid heavy losses of her party in regional elections.<\/p>\n
But Merkel underlined that she wanted to remain chancellor until her term ends in 2021.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Germany’s Christian Democrats (CDU) are set to vote on Friday to choose Chancellor Angela Merkel\u2019s successor as party leader in a knife-edge election. Recent surveys showed around 48 percent of the CDU voters backed Merkel loyalist Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer for the leadership, while 35 percent supported Friedrich Merz, an outspoken critic of Merkel\u2019s refugee policy. It …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":62088,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[80,63,1,118,101,14],"tags":[4307,7824,703],"class_list":["post-62087","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-breaking-news","category-daily","category-general","category-hot","category-politics","category-world","tag-angela-merkel","tag-christian-democrats","tag-germany"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62087","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62087"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62087\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/62088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62087"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}