Kramp-Karrenbauer’s resignation on Monday culminated what had been a catastrophic week. Merkel and Kramp-Karrenbauer seemed to share an ultimate goal: elevating the latter to the chancellery seat eventually vacated by the former.
(Merkel then appointed her to her cabinet as defense minister in 2019.) Kramp-Karrenbauer’s pitch to CDU party members was that she would heal the divisions within the party without ditching Merkel’s broadly popular political agenda, balancing between ideology and pragmatism in a way that would satisfy the base without turning off German voters more broadly. That provided sufficient runway for Kramp-Karrenbauer to successfully run for party leader less than a year later. Kramp-Karrenbauer was governor of the small western German state of Saarland when Merkel tapped her to serve as deputy party leader in Berlin. By 2018, those internal divisions had become impossible for the chancellor to tame on her own, and Kramp-Karrenbauer became her solution for managing her exit while securing her legacy. That decision opened up new divisions over migration in German politics-and within Merkel’s own center-right CDU party. That was still the case during the refugee crisis of 2015, when Merkel famously responded to the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Middle Eastern migrants on Germany’s doorstep with a temporary open-door policy.
Kramp-Karrenbauer has been a minor player in national German politics for most of her career. Here’s a brief rundown of how Europe’s most powerful country ended up here-and where it may be heading next. Everything else-the date of the next election, the platforms of the major parties, the candidates themselves-has been subsumed into the general confusion of Merkel’s extended lame duck reign. The only remaining certainty in German politics is that Merkel isn’t running for reelection.
The succession plan German Chancellor Angela Merkel carefully set into motion one year ago collapsed Monday when her preferred replacement, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, abruptly announced she would resign as leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party.
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