FRIEDRICH MERZ is doing it, and I’m fine with that.” This brief statement by Markus Söder, the head of Bavaria’s governing Christian Social Union (CSU), was enough to confirm what had long been clear in German political circles: that Mr Merz, leader of the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the CSU’s larger sibling, would be the parties’ joint candidate at next year’s federal election. Mr Merz will thus lead the opposition conservatives’ bid to unseat Olaf Scholz, the Social Democratic (SPD) chancellor.
The more interesting canidates would have been Günther or Wüst, both of them are currently ruling their states together with the green party and seem happy about what they were able to achieve there. Söder and Merz only differ a bit on how much they love bavaria.
The Greens are not doing too well in polls and Merz is clearly on an AfD appeasement course to make way for a possible right-wing coalition (or at least keep it as an option in coalition negotiations to minimize concessions to the SPD or the Greens).
I just wanted to say that the differences between Söder and Merz arent that big compared to other people that once were in the talks