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The Bundestag session on December 8 was particularly bitter for a parliamentarian:
Armin Laschet
, 60, had stepped up to inherit Chancellor Angela Merkel - instead, on that day, he had to experience how the Social Democrat Olaf Scholz was elected the ninth head of government in the history of the Federal Republic .
In the near future, Laschet will only be a simple member of parliament: he has handed over the offices of North Rhine-Westphalian Prime Minister and NRW CDU leader to Hendrik Wüst, and he will finally lose the federal chairmanship in January with the election of his successor Friedrich Merz.
Photo: Chris Emil Janssen / IMAGO
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For many years the left has been grappling with its best-known comrade
Sahra Wagenknecht
, 52. This year she went first up, but then down pretty deep.
First, with 60 percent, she managed to run for the federal election again.
At about the same time, she published a book that stayed on the bestseller lists for months.
But the election was also lost with her as the top candidate in North Rhine-Westphalia.
Your party is increasingly turning away from her.
At first they tried to get rid of them through a process of elimination.
Wagenknecht lost massive support in the left because of their negative attitude towards vaccination.
At the state party conference in North Rhine-Westphalia, her comrades were so annoyed by the ex-parliamentary group leader that her planned speech was simply eliminated from the agenda by a vote.
Photo: Jan Huebner / IMAGO
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Heiko Maas
, 55, is the only SPD minister from Angela Merkel's cabinet who did not make it into Olaf Scholz's government.
That had become apparent, the foreign minister had recently no longer enjoyed a good reputation within his own ranks.
Party friends criticized the Saarlander as too pale, too unremarkable.
In addition, there was the disaster surrounding the withdrawal of the Bundeswehr from Afghanistan.
Maas is now lining up on the back benches of the Bundestag for the time being.
Photo: Bernd von Jutrczenka / dpa
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Anton Hofreiter
, 51, was parliamentary leader of the Greens for eight years and was seen as set for the new federal government.
The leftists wanted to see him there, preferably as transport minister, alternatively as environment or agriculture minister.
The party leadership decided differently, without much warning.
For the moment, Hofreiter is only chairing the European Committee in the Bundestag.
Photo: Florian Gaertner / photothek / IMAGO
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The lawyer from Brandenburg once set herself an ambitious goal and wanted to play a leading role in the federal party.
In the spring of 2019,
Linda became Teutebergs
Wish come true, she elected FDP leader Christian Lindner as general secretary.
But because he was soon dissatisfied with her work, Lindner urged her to leave early, hardly more than a year later, in order to bring in Volker Wissing, an experienced state politician, into office.
He successfully negotiated the traffic light coalition in the federal government and became Minister of Transport.
Teuteberg's career, on the other hand, fell sharply: The 40-year-old member of the Bundestag, who is still a member of the federal executive, did not run again this year as the Brandenburg FDP chairman.
She justified this with wanting to concentrate on federal politics.
With this step, she left one thing above all in the FDP - perplexity.
Photo: Christian Spicker / IMAGO
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In the power struggle against radical forces in the AfD,
Jörg Meuthen wore
himself out
for months.
It had been foreseeable since the summer that he would not run for party leadership again - to the annoyance of the so-called moderates, who were hoping for a vote at a party congress to determine the balance of power between their and the radical camp.
Just because the federal party conference planned for December had to be postponed to the next six months due to the pandemic, the 60-year-old Meuthen received an unexpected extension as co-chairman at the side of his adversary Tino Chrupalla.
Meuthen's further political future in the AfD is uncertain, until the next European elections in 2024 he will remain a MEP in Brussels and Strasbourg.
Photo: Revierfoto / IMAGO
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