German conservative leader Friedrich Merz says he will run for chancellor

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German conservative leader Friedrich Merz has announced he will run for chancellor in next year’s elections, saying the country’s centre-right is fully united behind his candidacy.

The move by the leader of the Christian Democratic Union finally resolves one of the biggest questions hovering over Europe’s biggest economy — who will lead Germany’s centre-right into the Bundestag election that current polls suggest it has a strong chance of winning.

The decision on Tuesday sets up next year’s election as a duel between Merz and Olaf Scholz, the Social Democrat chancellor, who has already announced he will seek a second term.

In recent weeks, speculation had grown that Markus Söder, leader of the CDU’s Bavarian sister party the Christian Social Union, might challenge Merz for the role of “chancellor candidate”.

However, at a hastily convened press conference in Berlin on Tuesday, Söder squashed the rumours, saying he was backing Merz.

“The chancellor question has been decided. Friedrich Merz is doing it,” he said. “I’m fine about that, and I support it unequivocally.”

Current polls put the CDU/CSU up to 19 percentage points ahead of Scholz’s Social Democrats. The SPD and coalition partners the Greens and the liberal Free Democrats have seen their approval ratings plunge amid frequent internecine squabbling.

The three parties performed particularly poorly in elections in the eastern states of Thuringia and Saxony on September 1, when they were both eclipsed by the far-right Alternative for Germany.

They face their next big test on Sunday when voters in Brandenburg go to the polls to elect a new regional parliament. The SPD has long governed the eastern state but this time could be beaten by the AfD.

Merz, a former head of the supervisory board of BlackRock Germany, said the CDU/CSU was “in parts of our country the last remaining big-tent party of the democratic centre”, giving it a “great responsibility”.

He said the Christian Democrats had shown their mettle in recent days by pushing Scholz’s government to adopt tougher immigration policies, such as expanding temporary controls to all of Germany’s land borders.

“We want to take over the leadership of this country . . . with policies that take Germany forward [and] get the country functioning again,” Merz said.

Senior SPD figures said Merz’s decision to run for chancellor improved the chances of Scholz winning a second term. “Merz lacks the coolness of Scholz,” said Johannes Fechner, an SPD MP. “He has a very short fuse.”

He said voters will be more convinced by the SPD’s offer of stable pensions and child-friendly policies than by Merz’s proposed welfare cuts and pro-business platform.   

Merz said the big issue in next year’s election would be the “precarious” state of the German economy. He said the CDU/CSU would focus on improving “conditions for everyone, not allocating subsidies to the few”, as he claimed the Scholz government was doing.

Merz’s prospects of being named the CDU/CSU’s joint candidate rose sharply on Monday when another potential contender, Hendrik Wüst, prime minister of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, announced he would not run for chancellor.

But Söder had sown speculation that he might still be interested in running. Many in the conservative establishment feared a rerun of 2021 when Söder fought the then CDU leader Armin Laschet for the right to run as joint candidate for the CDU/CSU.

The resulting power struggle undermined the conservatives’ campaign, with some analysts arguing the divisions helped send the CDU/CSU into opposition for the first time in 16 years.

But Söder promised that “2021 won’t repeat itself”. Part of the reason for the more peaceful relationship between the CDU and CSU, he said, was Merz’s tougher approach on immigration, implying that it had essentially come round to its Bavarian sister party’s view on the issue.

“The CDU’s fundamentally new approach to immigration healed a wound between the CDU and the CSU,” Söder said, adding that Merz had his total support.

“For the first time, we are completely on the same page; we have no disagreements.”