On Monday, Angela Merkel did something quite extraordinary. As speculation about her party’s leadership mounted, she named an apparent successor: thae 55-year-old Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, appointed as the new general secretary of her Christian Democratic Union party. The choice came like a lightning strike: AKK, as she is already called, was to leave her job as a successful minister-president of the tiny federal state of Saarland and assume the governing position in her party. Now she sits as the CDU’s crown princess, looking to take the throne at (or even before) the next German election in 2021.
So Merkel has answered critics who considered her unwilling or unable to refresh her senior team. ‘The Chancellor without an alternative’ she used to be called — a phrase that looked rather complacent after the cataclysmic election where Merkel seemed to have single-handedly made Alternative für Deutschland into a force in German politics.
Elevating AKK was most unlike Merkel.
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