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Candidates Merz, Röttgen, Laschet in the CDU headquarters with a moderator
Photo: Bernd von Jutrczenka / dpa
A gray table, three men, a light blue backdrop with the party logo.
So this is what it looks like when the candidates for the CDU chairmanship meet in Corona times.
And then, unfortunately, the tall Friedrich Merz was placed opposite the presenter on the other long side, so that he constantly had to stretch his long legs somewhere.
Armin Laschet and Norbert Röttgen, on the other hand, sit so dynamically behind the table, as if they had already spent many hours here.
Every now and then a service person with a face mask comes and serves fresh water in slim glasses.
Nobody wanted an election campaign for party leadership in the midst of the pandemic.
Not the candidates, the vast majority of citizens are currently likely to be interested in completely different things anyway, everything revolves around Corona these days.
Whether the candidate Laschet, incidentally Prime Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia and thus the highest crisis manager in the most populous German state, is therefore briefly typing on his mobile phone while the contestant Merz is giving a lecture on the subject of finance?
A crisis SMS maybe?
In any case, that is one of the excitements of the first 90-minute meeting in the atrium of the CDU headquarters.
"How we can discuss well with one another in the CDU," Laschet will formulate as a positive conclusion of the round.
You could also say: If you take these one and a half hours as a yardstick, it doesn't really matter which of the three gentlemen is elected as the new party leader on January 16 and is therefore also a possible candidate for Union Chancellor for the upcoming federal election.
Laschet tries again and again to score with his role as Prime Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, Röttgen wants to appear particularly modern, but also speaks of "members" because of sheer progressiveness, while Merz seems most emotional when he reports about his expected fifth grandchild.
It's a very harmonious evening among Christian Democrats.
For the first time since mid-October, the three candidates are back together in front of the camera - at that time they presented themselves virtually to the members of the Junge Union for the JU vote on the party chairman.
Ex-parliamentary group leader Merz was clearly ahead, not surprisingly, because he is particularly well received by the more conservative Union offspring.
On the other hand, it was more surprising that the foreign politician Röttgen came in second.
However, Röttgen seems to have had a kind of run since then, in several surveys he was most recently ahead of Laschet.
And some people are already wondering whether the one who started as a blatant outsider even has a chance of the runoff in the end.
Because there is hardly any doubt that Merz with his clear profile - even if that only shines through here and there on Monday evening - will reach the second round.
The exciting question is: against whom does he have to stand for election?
This person in turn should have a pretty good chance of being elected as the new party leader.
Because none of the three has such euphoric fans as Merz - but none of them meets with so much rejection.
For Röttgen and Laschet, it is really only a matter of reaching the runoff election and then hoping that the majority of the delegates will also elect you as chairman, so that only Merz will not be.
The matter with the party congress is finally settled
After all, it has now been clarified how and when the CDU will get its new chairman.
Finally.
As a reminder: The incumbent party leader Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer announced on February 10 that she was renouncing the chairmanship - that was over ten months ago.
But Kramp-Karrenbauer and the office stuck together like chewing gum: First the party convention planned for April in Berlin was canceled with the election of a successor due to Corona, then the delegates' meeting in Stuttgart planned for the beginning of this month, also due to the pandemic.
But on January 16, the time has come: Then the 1001 delegates will come together digitally for the first time in the history of the party and in this way elect the entire board, but initially the new party leader.
General Secretary Paul Ziemiak has rarely been seen so proud when he explained details to journalists on Monday afternoon.
In fact, there has never been a federal party conference including board elections in digital form in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany.
And Ziemiak has apparently decided to emphasize the chances of this experiment for himself and the CDU, rather than emphasize the risks and obstacles present.
Merz stuck to the idea of the presence party conference for a long time
If nothing comes of the way, the Secretary General and his party will look unusually progressive early next year - and have clarified the chairman's question.
Otherwise?
"You can never find a 100 percent solution," says the CDU leadership, otherwise you would have to hold a presence party conference.
And it is now clear even to Merz, who stuck to the idea for a long time, that this is prohibited in the near future in view of the corona situation.
In order to make the matter as legally secure as possible, there will be a final written vote on each federal board position at the end, this result should be available on January 22nd.
What Ziemiak and his people came up with in the CDU headquarters sounds elaborate: You can still complain against the procedure, the Internet can fail, ballot papers can be lost, and in the worst case, the digital vote could also be hacked by foreign services or whoever .
The general secretary swears that they have "certified providers with a lot of know-how" under contract.
The matter of the final vote also harbors a certain personnel policy risk: "This is a theoretical possibility," Ziemiak admits when asked whether the delegates could vote differently in writing than they did before digitally.
In other words: The winner of an expected (virtual) runoff election could stand in the final vote without a majority.
Or someone - let's say the Federal Minister of Health Jens Spahn, who is very popular in the CDU and who has so far supported Laschet - could, in the event of a victory for Merz in the runoff election, declare that he will take part in the written vote.
That may sound theoretical and rather improbable.
But what if you could have predicted the developments in the CDU in the current year?
What the 90-minute round table of the three gentlemen in the Adenauer-Haus covers: the candidates have been so rough with each other in the past few months that the outgoing chairman has been prompted several times to warn of a "ruinous competition".
The party is nowhere near as good as it seems.
The CDU is hollowed out in terms of content, the good poll numbers are in part only due to the regained popularity of Chancellor Angela Merkel, and the Bavarian Prime Minister and CSU leader Markus Söder, who is suddenly very popular throughout Germany, wants to have at least a serious say in the question of the Union's candidacy for Chancellor or even compete yourself.
A little harmony can certainly do no harm, especially since one has to assume that most of the party congress delegates have already made up their minds.
But maybe one or the other candidate will want to set themselves apart from the others a little more than this time when the three gentlemen meet on January 8th for the second part of the round in the party headquarters.
It doesn't have to be ruinous right away.
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