The foreign politician wants to take over the chairmanship of the CDU.
(Photo: dpa)
Berlin The foreign politician Norbert Röttgen wants to become the new CDU chairman. The 56-year-old member of the Bundestag announced his candidacy to succeed party leader Armin Laschet on Friday.
He is running, “out of the deep conviction that there is no such thing as” going back like this “, and certainly no” going back “,” he said at the federal press conference in Berlin. It is about “a renewal of the CDU with a defined content”. “The Christian democratic idea for our time must be worked out with the members, and it must compete with the other parties.”
In the event of his election, Röttgen presented Franziska Hoppermann, a member of the Bundestag from Hamburg, as future CDU general secretary.
It is expected that the executive head of the Chancellery, Helge Braun, will also be nominated in the course of the day. At a virtual state board meeting of the Hessian CDU, the 49-year-old wants to present the reasons for his application, as a spokesman for the Hessian CDU has announced. The nomination by the Gießen district association should also take place this Friday.
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It is also expected that the former Union parliamentary group leader in the Bundestag, Friedrich Merz, will also register a candidacy. However, he has not yet commented on this in detail. Röttgen and Merz had already run for the CDU chairmanship last January, but were inferior to Laschet at the time. Röttgen now said that he was running because he thought he could be elected this time.
Laschet was then also candidate for chancellor of the Union for the federal election. In September, the CDU and CSU achieved a historically poor result of 24.1 percent. Laschet is therefore relinquishing the chairmanship of the party after less than a year. The former Prime Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia is now just a simple member of the Bundestag.
The new chairman of the CDU, which currently has around 400,000 members, is to be elected at a federal party conference on January 21 in Hanover. Before that, the CDU wants to conduct a member survey for the first time in its history. There the decision will actually be made as to who will be at the head of the party in the future. Unsuccessful applicants should not compete at the party congress.
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