“I call on women to get involved. A match reserved for men is no longer in tune with the times ”. Barely a month after Angela Merkel’s sentence, her party is preparing to launch the participatory process to choose its new leader. And like last time, there are no women among the candidates. The trio who aspire to succeed the German Chancellor at the head of the Christian Democrats is Friedrich Merz, 66; Norbert Röttgen, 56, and Helge Braun, 49. Three middle-aged men from western Germany.

The crushing electoral defeat of September 26 called into question the Christian Democratic Union (CDU): neither the sympathizers nor their own bases were no longer in phase with the leadership of the old mass party. The management has decided to take over and renew all management positions, giving the floor to the 400,000 members, who will vote for the first time among the various candidates. Until now, the president – or president – of the party was elected by 1,001 delegates at a federal congress.

On Wednesday, the deadline for submitting candidatures was closed without any of the women in the party finally taking the plunge or any of the young promises we had talked about – almost all of them men – those weeks. Sabine Buder, a 37-year-old veterinarian in the Bundestag, was the only one who tried. “I want to send a signal to young women to be courageous and take responsibility,” she said on public television. But his own group in the Land of East Brandenburg blocked his way by voting against his candidacy. Contrary to what is customary in the CDU, Buder did not devote himself to climbing party positions as a teenager, but entered politics late, having had four children and ran a veterinary clinic for decades. years. She was a “political outsider” as he called her The mirror.

Helge Braun is the only candidate to add something new to the trio aspiring to the Conservative leadership. A doctor by training, he was Merkel’s right-hand man in the grand coalition government as Minister of Chancellery. And that comes from the state of Hesse, not North Rhine-Westphalia, where all the Conservative candidates who have come forward have come from there. From there Friedrich Merz and Norbert Röttgen, who meet for the second time in a year. The two were in competition with Armin Laschet, the outgoing president, last January to lead the CDU. For Merz, Merkel’s historical enemy and considered one of the more conservative wings, this is the third attempt to take over the leadership of the Christian Democrats. In 2018, she lost to Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, the Chancellor’s disciple who left her post months later when she was unable to reaffirm her leadership.

Online Meetings

The CDU has organized a series of online meetings to promote the candidates among its affiliates. Merz starts next Monday; on the 24th it will be Röttgen’s turn and on the 25th Braun will perform. On December 1, the three will coincide in a joint act at the headquarters of the Christian Democrats in Berlin. They will answer basic questions “in a modern live chat format,” the training promises. This will be a good time to contrast your views on the ideological course the party will take after the departure of Merkel, who chaired the party for 18 years. His two successors have been in office for less than a year.

Merz had postulated the last two times as the only one capable of bringing training back to its “essences” after the social-democratic drift of the chancellor. It remains to be seen what role he will take on this time, but he seems to want to disassociate himself from his image as a pure and hard conservative. When announcing his candidacy, he said he did not intend to give the party “a turn to the right”. He also introduced what would be his closest team. He will appoint Mario Czaja, 46, secretary general; and Christina Stumpp, 34, assistant secretary general, a position that does not exist today. It should be created for her. Centrist Röttgen also nominated a woman for the post of general secretary, 39-year-old Franziska Hoppermann.

Second-rate positions, if at all, and that’s probably not the idea Merkel had in mind when she spoke about the issue last month and pointed out that if a party [en referencia al suyo] he wants to remain a Volkspartei (party of the great people) “he must attract more women to its ranks and seek parity”. For now, Merkel’s leadership – and the very brief one of Kramp-Karrenbauer – seems to have been a parenthesis in the male domination of German conservatives.

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