Experienced EU member countries tend to keep their lists rather short since they know that when it comes to the term presidency, the first two and last two months are not very useful. Small and inexperienced states, however, due to overexerting their lists and putting too much emphasis on the term presidency, tend to be unsuccessful.

Germany is intending to utilize this Council presidency for the federal Bundestag elections that will be held in 2021.

However, there is a problem. Are the elections that were intended to be held in 2021 really going to be held in 2021? The answer to this question is not clear because of serious problems with the federal government. Chancellor Angela Merkel is not going to be a candidate for chancellor in 2021. German Defense Minister and new Christian Democratic Union (CDU) President Annegret Kramp-Karenbauer, who is the candidate Merkel has envisaged, has already “gotten old.” The number of CDU and Christian Social Union (CSU) members that are unwilling to see her as chancellor is increasing with every passing day. This situation is not ordinary for CDU voters.

The Social Democratic Party (SDP), which is the partner of the federal government that is getting smaller by losing voters every day, is bothered by itself right now. At the beginning of December, for the first time in its history, it is not going to elect just one president but instead will elect co-presidents. To select the co-president candidates, one of whom is female and the other is male, a vote was held among 425,000 SPD members. In such an important election, only 53% of the members participated and none of the co-president duos received sufficient votes. Because of this, between two co-president duos that received the most votes, a new vote is being cast. The 425,000 SPD members now have the opportunity to elect their co-presidents by voting on Nov. 19 and 30. The election results will be announced on Nov. 30. The delegates within the SPD congress that will be held after the vote must confirm this result. In reality, the co-president election is also an election for whether the party should continue with the coalition or move to the opposition. After electing its co-presidents, the SPD, in any case, has to sit down and bargain with CDU and CSU based on its party base’s disposition, since the majority of the SPD base is already against the coalition. If the coalition is to be continued, there is the expectation of fresh negotiations on terms for the coalition.

In this case, it seems there is going to be a governmental crisis. The CDU and CSU will not find a warm reception in having to negotiate a signed coalition agreement which is valid until the 2021 elections. However, there is another reality: if there is an early election, centrist parties like the CDU, CSU, and SPD know very well that they are going to lose. Perhaps because of this, these three parties know very well that they have to cooperate to remain in government.

The CDU held its party congress in Leipzig last weekend. The new president of CDU, Kramp-Karrenbauer, in an unaccustomed fashion had to ask “the question of trust” to CDU delegates. Only by this question could she manage to receive the applause of all the delegates after her speech, which was longer than expected. Former Federal Assembly group president during the 2000-2004 period, Friedrich Merz, who is her rival in both the presidency and the chancellorship races, also cooperated with Kramp-Karrenbauer this time. The suggestion of electing the chancellor candidate by a vote of all members in the CDU congress has been rejected. Both Kramp-Karrenbauer and Merz remained faithful to the decision that the chancellor candidate should be determined in 2020.

While all of this was happening, CSU President and Bavaria Province President Markus Söder – who would not surprise us if he made a sudden move in 2020 into the chancellorship race as the joint candidate of CDU and CSU – received significant attention when he arrived at the CDU congress as if he were the CDU president. Let us take this detail as a side note for now. If the presidential candidate of CDU and CSU comes from CSU in 2020, nobody should be surprised.

However, due to all of the above developments that we have noted, Germany’s EU Council presidency that will begin in July 2020 is not a very popular subject for now. However, for the CDU and CSU, it seems it is going to play a very important role.

Merkel’s failure in the latest federal elections diminished her influence within the EU. In order for the new chancellor of Germany to be influential and powerful again, the chancellor first must become successful in Germany. However, for them to win the elections in Germany, the term presidency of the EU Council has to be successful.

In short, it will be possible to detect the performance of Germany’s new chancellor candidate through the EU Council presidency.

Source: https://www.dailysabah.com/columns/ozan-ceyhun/2019/11/25/who-is-going-to-be-germanys-chancellor-in-2021

The post Who is going to be Germany’s chancellor in 2021? first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

LAST week a dispute over immigration policy took Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Christian Social Union (CSU), their conservative Bavarian partners, to the brink of divorce. “I can’t work with this woman any more!” a furious Horst Seehofer, the CSU interior minister, fumed of the chancellor for blocking his proposal to turn migrants registered in other EU countries back at German borders. Open hostilities flew between CDU and CSU MPs, who sit in a single parliamentary group, in the halls of the Bundestag as the Bavarians refused to back  down, pouring scorn on the chancellor’s request for two weeks to find a “European solution”.

But the weekend cooled heads and now détente has broken out. A meeting of the CSU leadership in Munich yesterday gave Mr Seehofer its blessing to impose the new border regime against Mrs Merkel’s will (whether or not the wording of the German constitution gives him the right to do so is debatable), but agreed that he would not act on this for two weeks, waiting to see the outcome of the chancellor’s European negotiations. For her part she conceded her interior minister permission to turn back refugees banned from Germany; albeit that measure is already mostly in effect.

The dispute is now stable, but not yet resolved. The CSU remains sceptical about the chancellor’s ability, at the EU summit on June 28th and 29th, to forge a long-elusive deal fixing the Dublin system regulating immigration to the EU, which grants responsibility for registering and processing immigrants to the member state where they first arrive. The Bavarians, whose state borders Austria and thus is the main entry point for those travelling north from Greece or Italy, accuse southern European states of waving through “asylum tourists” to Germany.

Mr Seehofer considers the long-term solution “anchor centres”, centralised immigration camps currently in operation in Bavaria, where applicants can be monitored and promptly deported if denied the right to stay. Until they are rolled out across the country, he reckons the only answer is to refuse entry to Germany to those registered elsewhere in the EU. How practical this would be is doubtful. The logistics of comprehensively manning, say, the 815km-long German-Austrian border, with its roughly 70 road crossings, are daunting. Whether Austria would readmit those refused entry by Germany is uncertain. Vienna might simply close its southern borders, prompting what Mrs Merkel described yesterday as a “domino effect”: a disastrous wave of unilateral border policies bringing down Europe’s free-movement regime. But the CSU’s goals are more than just practical: the party is also looking nervously at the state election in Bavaria in October, where the far-right Alternative for Germany threatens the party’s traditional hegemony.

What now? Mrs Merkel’s “European solution” will involve seeking bilateral deals with southern European states like Italy, Greece and Bulgaria to secure the prompt and automatic repatriation of immigrants from Germany to the states where they were first registered. These will not come easily: such countries feel they already bear an unfair share of the immigration burden. Indeed Italy’s new populist government, and particularly Matteo Salvini, its hard-right interior minister, is determined to reduce this burden at almost any cost. The chancellor will surely need to bring out her cheque-book. In her press conference yesterday she suggested she sees her existing cash-for-repatriations deal with Turkey, which has helped reduce flows of immigrants to Germany, as a template.

Following the EU summit late next week Mrs Merkel is due to present her achievements back in Berlin on July 1st. Then it will be up to the CSU to decide whether to accept them as substitutes for the threatened border policy, or whether Mr Seehofer should act unilaterally. The interior minister’s tough talk over the past days has left him little room to back down; he is in any case under pressure from Markus Söder, his long-time rival and the current prime minister of Bavaria, and Alexander Dobrindt, the CSU’s leader in the Bundestag, to keep up the pressure on the chancellor. Most likely is that Mrs Merkel will achieve enough in her European talks over the coming days for some compromise (perhaps involving step-by-step increases in border patrols and checks) to be reached with the CSU. But it is far from certain.

But if not? Mrs Merkel has made it clear that unilateral action by Mr Seehofer would be an act of war, yesterday stressing that the absence of a European solution should not automatically lead to the new controls and asserting that such matters were her responsibility as chancellor. All of which would make it hard for her to smooth over relations with any semblance of authority in the event of a unilateral move by her interior minister in early July.

In that event Mrs Merkel may therefore have no practical alternative but to fire him, which would probably eject the CSU from her coalition, leaving its remaining components (her CDU and the Social Democrats) just short of a majority. The Greens or the pro-business Free Democrats might be persuaded to make up the numbers, perhaps supporting the government in crucial votes without formally joining it. But Mrs Merkel’s authority would be greatly, perhaps terminally, diminished. She might stand down in favour of Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, the CDU general secretary and her preferred heir. A more disorderly departure might favour the chances of more Merkel-critical figures in the CDU, like Jens Spahn, the health minister and an ally of Mr Dobrindt.

Yet for now, as last week, a health-warning applies: do not write off Mrs Merkel just yet. The chancellor remains the most popular politician in Germany. She retains the support of most of her party; including that of a number of MPs not currently speaking up, to avoid further inflaming relations with the CSU, but who would stand behind her should her leadership come under dire threat. None of her possible replacements looks quite ready to step into her shoes yet (were this drama playing out in a couple of years’ time the picture might be different). The CSU’s tactics seem to be backfiring: polls show support for both the CDU/CSU nationally and the CSU in Bavaria falling. Many in the CDU, and some quietly sceptical moderates in the CSU, are losing patience with Mr Seehofer’s theatrics. It is one of the central rules of German politics that voters prize stability above most things. For as long as Mrs Merkel looks a better guarantor of that stability than her rivals, she remains a force to be reckoned with.

Source: https://www.economist.com/kaffeeklatsch/2018/06/19/angela-merkel-has-two-weeks-to-keep-germanys-centre-right-together

The post Angela Merkel has two weeks to keep Germany’s centre-right together first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.