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Bloomberg
The battle over who succeeds Angela Merkel as the next German chancellor candidate entered a crucial phase on Tuesday when the outgoing head of her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) would hold talks with a leading CDU politician to take over as party chief.
Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, who blew open the race to replace Merkel last week by announcing that she will resign, will meet Friedrich Merz as she tries to engineer a smooth transition and avert damaging internal bickering, according to a party official who asked not to be identified by name.
Merz, a former CDU caucus leader and long-term Merkel antagonist, is one of three leading candidates to replace the four-term chancellor, along with Health Minister Jens Spahn and Armin Laschet, the State Premier of North Rhine-Westphalia.
Kramp-Karrenbauer, widely known by her initials AKK, is due to meet Spahn and Laschet later this week, as well as two other potential CDU candidates, the party official said. She will then make a recommendation to CDU leaders February 24 on how to proceed.
One of the two other candidates is Norbert Roettgen, a former environment minister who is head of the foreign policy committee in the Bundestag lower house of parliament.
Roettgen, who announced his intention to run on Tuesday, belongs to the CDU’s liberal wing and was once a close Merkel confidant. But she fired him after he led the CDU to its worst electoral result in North Rhine-Westphalia in May 2012, failing to recapture Germany’s most populous state from the Social Democrats.
It’s the only example of Merkel actively firing one of her cabinet members.
The CDU wants the three main candidates to come to an agreement on who will run, according to the party official.