The dpa spreads the news in the evening: Friedrich Merz wants to become CDU leader and candidate for chancellor. The Merkel party is facing a historic election. And maybe their biggest ordeal. A comment by Merkur editor-in-chief Georg Anastasiadis.
There are many things that can be said against Friedrich Merz: his past at Blackrock, his arrogance, which he likes to let others feel, the unconditionality with which he works towards his goal and sometimes overshoots it. But nobody can deny him one thing: Merz returns passion, emotion to politics - and thus an energy that Angela Merkel, with her way of modernizing, has removed without residue in 15 years. But it is exactly this energy that democracy needs. It is their elixir.
Is Merz a conservative, a polarizer? Luckily, it is: luckily: with him, if he won the chancellor's candidacy, the alternative would return, in a good sense. The voters would finally know again what the Union stands for, what the Greens stand for and what the SPD is fighting for. That would be an invaluable advantage in terms of the necessary containment of the AfD, and it would in no way stand in the way of a later black and green alliance. Because this can only work if both parties are led by self-confident people who the voters believe will take good care of the core of their program - as Sebastian Kurz does in Austria.
It is consequent that Merz is the first to venture out of cover: he is not the man in the back room, in which the CDU strippers just want to replace another. The 64-year-old is a fighter and, in style and content, the counter-proposal to Armin Laschet, which the Chancellor chose to defend her legacy. The CDU is facing a historic, a destiny choice.
