Can the german centre hold? Only if it embraces a new generation  | thearticle

Angela Merkel’s designated successor, Annagret Kramp-Karrenbauer, has done the decent thing. AKK, as she was known, has announced her resignation as leader of the Christian Democratic Union

(CDU) — but she proposes to hang on until next December. Meanwhile, rivals for the crown will fight it out, as power ebbs away from a lame duck Chancellor and a crumbling coalition that have

lost one regional election after another. Rarely has a politician acquired a less appropriate nickname. Having pulled the trigger, AKK should have gone immediately. It has taken her two

years to come to a conclusion that was obvious from the outset: she is just not big enough to fill Mrs Merkel’s shoes. That has nothing to do with her diminutive stature, but much to do with

an indecisiveness that proved fatal and is once again manifest in her reluctance to quit the stage. As Macbeth puts it: “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done

quickly.” It would be a truism to say that AKK struggled to emerge from the shadow of her patron, who has made matters worse by handing over the party leadership while carrying on as head of

government. Whoever accepts the poisoned chalice would be wise to make it conditional upon Mrs Merkel finally stepping down. Her refusal to relinquish the Chancellorship has diminished both

herself and her office. Not only Germany but Europe abhors a vacuum at the top. What brought about this denouement? An even longer shadow than Merkel’s — that of Adolf Hitler. Germany now

has six major parties, just as it did at the end of the Weimar Republic. In the eastern provinces, politics is dominated by the far-Right and the far-Left.  After an election in Thuringia

last autumn, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) emerged as the largest party. For months, the Social Democrats and the Greens tried to cobble together a coalition with the former Communist

party, now known as The Left. When it came to a vote in the regional assembly, however, it was not the Left but the Right that won: the leader of the liberal Free Democrats — but with the

votes not only of the CDU but also of the AfD.  As the news broke that for the first time since 1945 a _Ministerpräsident_ had been elected in a German _Land_ with the far-Right calling the

shots, the effect in Berlin was seismic. Those involved were shamed into resigning and the AfD was cast back into outer darkness. Now AKK, who failed to head off this blow to German

prestige, has joined a growing list of political casualties.  It does not seem to matter that the far-Left will now run Thuringia. Even though the legacy of the Stasi is a much more recent

memory, the horror of the Holocaust persists. In the outskirts of Weimar, the jewel in Thuringia’s crown, stood the watchtowers of Buchenwald. Yet this was a region that once voted for the

Nazis and in the long run the anger and resentment that brought them to power may, if ignored by the mainstream parties, re-emerge. The task for the new leader who will replace AKK, sooner

rather than later, is to harness the energy of young Germans, impatient for this crepuscular coda of the Merkel era to end. There are two older candidates, Friedrich Merz and Armin Laschet,

who promise business as usual — literally so in the case of Merz, who left politics for a lucrative career as a corporate lawyer more than a decade ago. He is slightly to the right of

Laschet, but neither looks likely to revive the fortunes of a party that has dominated postwar German politics but now seems to have run out of ideas. The only hopeful likely to inspire hope

is Jens Spahn (pictured), the 39-year-old health minister. He finished behind both AKK and Merz in the last leadership contest two years ago and has kept a low profile since. But he is the

only centre-Right politician in Germany with courage, character and charisma. The coronavirus crisis will now test his competence too.  The main thing that most Germans know about Spahn is

that he is openly gay. In such a socially conservative country — where same-sex marriage was only legalised recently — this could be an obstacle to his ascent. But German voters have proved

remarkably tolerant of leaders with unconventional private lives in the past. Willy Brandt, Helmut Kohl and Gerhard Schröder all had extramarital affairs while in office. Spahn is a

Catholic, now happily married to his partner, and unapologetic about his homosexuality. It is high time for a nation of pensioners to embrace the new generation representated by Spahn. If

the Christian Democrats try to play safe, there are others hungry for power waiting in the wings.