Bad pick. Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer (AKK), the runner-up chosen by Angela Merkel to succeed him, threw in the towel fourteen months after being elected on the wire at the head of the CDU. It has never succeeded in establishing its authority over Christian Democrats who are deeply divided between the social current of the Chancellor, who anchored her party in the center, and a conservative wing which accuses her of having thus opened up space to the 'far right. In Thuringia, last week, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) gave him the kiss of death by breaking the "sanitary cordon" which forbids the CDU any alliance with the extremes, from the left (Die Linke) of right. Learning from this fiasco, the resignation of AKK plunges the country into a crisis of succession which has everything of a crisis of regime.
After more than fourteen years in power, Angela Merkel checks a brazen law, already suffered by Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Kohl: the fourth term is still the term too many. tired,
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