Overview – Skip to a certain paragraph:

☛ A Rhenish Catholic and a Committed European

☛ Membership of the CDU

☛ Decision to Study Law

☛ Early Career in Bonn

☛ Family and Return to Aachen

☛ City Councillor in Aachen

☛ Election to the Bundestag

☛ Parliament Member in Bonn and Dialogues with the Green Party

☛ Member of the European Parliament

☛ Minister in the Government of North Rhine-Westphalia

☛ Setback and Comeback: Chairman of the CDU and the CDU Landtag Group in North Rhine-Westphalia

☛ New CDU Line-Up in North Rhine-Westphalia

☛ Minister President of North Rhine-Westphalia

☛ On the National Political Stage

☛ The Power Struggle Between Laschet and Söder for the Chancellor Candidacy

☛ Candidate, but Not Chancellor

☛ A Step Back from Front-Line Politics

☛ Back to the Roots – Armin Laschet as Foreign Policy Expert in the Bundestag

☛ A Politician with a Clear Moral Compass

 

A Rhenish Catholic and a Committed European

The two great constants in the life of Armin Laschet are his Christian faith and the city of Aachen – the historical seat of bishops at the heart of Europe. He was born on 18 February 1961, the first child of Heinrich Laschet, a mineworker, and his wife Marcella (née Frings), in the Aachen district of Burtscheid. His father Heinrich, who was known as Heinz, was still working underground as a mining supervisor in the year that his oldest son, Armin, was born. In the mid-1960s, however, he retrained to become a teacher and then took a position as headmaster of a primary school in Aachen. Laschet had the example of his father in mind when, as minister president of North Rhine-Westphalia, he announced that education policy would be one of the priorities of his government. The state, he said, is responsible for ensuring that every child enjoys ‘the best educational opportunities’, because ‘advancement through education is the great promise of an open and democratic society’.

Armin Laschet and his three younger brothers (Remo, Carsten, and Patrick) grew up in a family in which the division of responsibilities between father and mother was typical of the time. While his father Heinz supported the family financially, his mother Marcella saw to the housekeeping and looked after their four sons. Her zest for life, vivacious temperament and initiative had a lasting influence on her oldest son. Like his mother, Laschet became involved in the local Catholic parish of St. Michael in Burtscheid. He was active in the parish youth group, for instance, and sang in the church choir.

In addition to Catholicism, Laschet was also shaped by the European tradition of his native city. As an ‘Öcher’, as those from Aachen call themselves in the local dialect, he grew up with an enthusiasm for Europe. The city of Aachen is situated near the Belgian and Dutch borders, and since 1950, it has awarded the Charlemagne Prize (Karlspreis) to individuals and institutions for services to Europe and European unification. Growing up in the region, Laschet learned early on what it means to think and live beyond borders. Visiting an outdoor swimming pool in Belgium or shopping in the Netherlands were completely natural things to do, even when he was in grade school. His support for a Europe of open borders has been a recurrent theme throughout his political career, and the call for ‘more Europe” is for him not just a dictate of political necessity in the age of globalization but, above all, something personal and very close to his heart.

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Membership of the CDU

His family background gives no hint that Armin Laschet would one day pursue the career of a professional politician. Although his parents were loyal CDU voters, they were never politically active. Their oldest son, however, discovered a passion for politics in the second half of the 1970s. Those were years of significant controversy and debate over education policy in North Rhine-Westphalia. In 1978, the CDU opposition won a significant victory in state politics with a successful petition for a referendum to prevent the introduction of the Kooperative Schule (cooperative school), which was considered a precursor to the Gesamtschule (comprehensive school). Laschet joined the Schüler-Union, a CDU/CSU-affiliated organisation for schoolchildren, and became its district chairman for a year before ultimately joining the CDU itself in 1979.

The ‘linchpin of my politics’, he has said, is to take the Christian conception of man as the moral foundation on which people – often from very diverse backgrounds – can come together in the big-tent party of the CDU. The Christian element of the Christian Democratic Union is of lasting importance for Laschet as the bond that unites the Christian-social, liberal and conservative movements within the CDU; for him, ‘politics as a Christian responsibility’ is no mere slogan.

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Decision to Study Law

This theme of Christian values as a standard by which political action should be judged also emerged during the rearmament debate of the early 1980s, when hundreds of thousands of people in West Germany followed the calls of the 'peace movement' and protested against NATO's ‘double-track decision’. Laschet, who sat for his Abitur (high school certificate) at the Bischöfliches Pius-Gymnasium (Episcopal Pius High School) in Aachen in 1981, was transitioning to a new chapter of his life during this time. Since he had been exempted from military service on health grounds – he suffers from Scheuermann's disease, a growth disorder that affects the spine during childhood and can lead to painful posture problems – he was able to begin his university education immediately after completing his Abitur. By his final year of school, Laschet had abandoned the idea of studying theology, but was still giving some consideration to teacher training. Ultimately, though, he decided to pursue a law degree after attending a workshop in that field in the twelfth grade.

His studies led him first to the University of Munich and later to the University of Bonn. During this period, Laschet was aided by a scholarship from the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (KAS).

He met a wide variety of people at university, through association with his fellow KAS scholarship recipients and through his membership in the Catholic student associations Aenania München and Ripuaria Bonn. One of these contacts led him to the broadcaster Bayerischer Rundfunk and thus to journalism, which he found intriguing for its combination of research and presentation. Laschet had already shown an interest in this field in his youth. He had written for the school newspaper, for example, and had helped to edit the yearbook for his graduating high school class. During carnival, he had served as an emcee for stage shows, and at the university, he had founded and edited a student newspaper called Libertas.

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Early Career in Bonn

After four semesters in the Bavarian capital, Armin Laschet continued his study of law and politics in Bonn in 1983. From 1983 to 1987, he worked as a student assistant to Bundestag member Hans Stercken, who represented the city of Aachen. Stercken was one of the leading foreign policy experts of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group and served as chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the Bundestag from 1985 to 1994. For Laschet, he was both a mentor and a political patron. He gave the younger man a grounding in West German foreign policy and taught him to think in terms of international relationships. Occasionally, Laschet was also permitted to accompany Stercken on foreign trips. Stercken epitomized the key foreign policy themes that the Union (CDU and CSU) had adhered to since the Adenauer era: Franco-German friendship, the unification of Europe, reconciliation with Israel, and alignment with the West, including close relations with the United States.

After passing the first state examination in law at the Higher Regional Court of Cologne in 1987, Laschet stopped working in Hans Stercken’s office. Instead of applying for a clerkship and pursuing a career in law, he decided to become a journalist. He used his Munich contacts and completed what amounted to a trainee programme at the private radio station Radio Charivari. He also worked for Bayerischer Rundfunk, the Bavarian public broadcasting company, where he helped to set up an office for a Bonn correspondent, among other duties. In addition to his journalism work, he held a part-time job as a speech-writer in the office of Bundestag President Philipp Jenninger. In November 1988, Jenninger stepped down owing to misunderstandings over a speech that he had delivered on the fiftieth anniversary of the Reichspogromnacht. His successor, Rita Süssmuth, subsequently took Laschet on as a member of her team.

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Family and Return to Aachen

At the same time that Laschet was embarking on his career in Bonn, he started a family. On 18 May 1985, he married Susanne Malangré, who is also from Burtscheid. They had known one another since childhood and grown closer through their involvement in Catholic youth work and especially through the church choir. Susanne Laschet, a bookseller by trade, is an independent, self-assured woman who shares her husband’s interest in politics and is active in charitable projects, such as a shelter for homeless persons and a hospice foundation in her native city. The couple have three children: Johannes was born in 1989 in Bonn, and the two younger children, Eva and Julius, were born in Aachen, like their parents, after the family returned there in 1990.

Even after returning to his native city, Laschet maintained his professional ties to Bonn. He was contracted as an advisor to Bundestag President Rita Süssmuth. Both personally and professionally, however, Aachen was the centre of his life in the early 1990s. In 1990, he joined the editorial staff of the church newspaper for the diocese of Aachen and became editor-in-chief just a year later. The topics that Laschet took up in his editorials were contentious from the point of view of church policy. They included the question of how divorcees should be treated, whether women should be allowed as altar servers, and whether the church tax (levied by the German state on behalf of the churches) should be abolished. He did not shy away from taking stands on the controversial political issues of the day, even if they might provoke vehement opposition from his peers, such as when he advocated eliminating the Whit Monday holiday in order to help fund Germany's statutory insurance for nursing care. His stance in this case exhibited all the self-assurance of a mature and responsible Catholic layman, who would later (2008–2016) serve on the Central Committee of German Catholics, a lay body drawn from representatives of various Catholic organisations.

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City Councillor in Aachen

In addition to his work for the church, Laschet was advancing his political career. In October 1989, he became the youngest-ever member of Aachen City Council, where he held a seat without interruption until 2004. The local elections of 1989 represented a watershed moment, the most significant event in the history of the Aachen CDU since 1945: in addition to losing its absolute majority on the city council, the party also lost the office of mayor. Jürgen Linden, backed by a council majority composed of SPD and Green Party members, became the first Social Democrat to hold that office in Aachen. Following this historic electoral defeat, the Aachen CDU made a fresh political start. This was embodied in part by Laschet, who quickly became an established figure in the local politics of Aachen.

He made a name for himself on the city council as an effective public speaker and incisive debater. He also earned a great deal of recognition for the Night of Unity that he organised on the central market square in Aachen to celebrate the reunification of Germany on 2–3 October 1990, after the SPD-Green Party majority on the city council had proved itself incapable of arranging a suitable event to mark the occasion.

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Election to the Bundestag

In the internal CDU caucusing to choose candidates for the Bundestag election of 1994, Armin Laschet prevailed by a clear margin over his rival Dieter Bischoff, the chairman of the local chapter of the Mittelstands- und Wirtschaftsvereinigung of the CDU (a political organisation that represents the business interests of small and medium-sized enterprises). His success was due in part to the support of influential CDU politicians: Leo Frings, who became chairman of the Aachen CDU in 1988, succeeded in getting Laschet accepted as deputy chairman when the new district executive committee was elected, which was an important boost to his career. Franziska Neumann, who led the CDU group on the city council from 1985 to 1992, recognized Laschet's political talent and gave him scope to develop politically within the group and on the council. And Hans Stercken, a towering figure in the Aachen CDU in those days, brought his entire political weight to bear on behalf of his protégé.

Following an enthusiastic election campaign, which he conducted under the slogan ‘Listen. Decide. Act”, Laschet was elected to the Bundestag from the ward of Charlemagne (Karl des Großen) on 16 October 1994. He received 46.2 percent of the first votes.

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Parliament Member in Bonn and Dialogues with the Green Party

As the new Bundestag representative for Aachen, Armin Laschet devoted himself to foreign policy. He became a full member of the Committee for Economic Cooperation and Development as well as the Committee for European Union Affairs, and a deputy member of the Foreign Affairs Committee. Within the CDU/CSU parliamentary group, he belonged to a discussion group of young foreign policy specialists that was formed in September 1995 and included Bundestag newcomers Peter Altmaier, Hermann Gröhe, Andreas Krautscheid, Friedrich Merz and Gerd Müller, among others.

Laschet gave his first speech in the Bundestag on 22 September 1995 during a debate on the government’s Latin America policy, which he commended as showing ‘that policy can promote developments; that you don’t have to wait until a crisis to act but can also take action when your partner is on the right track’. He drew a great deal of attention later with his passionate commitment to the introduction of European Economic and Monetary Union on 1 January 1999 and his efforts on its behalf. Together with another member of the CDU parliamentary group, his colleague Franz Peter Basten from Trier, Laschet published a set of talking points called ‘Thoughts for the Discussion over European Monetary Union”. At the same time, he wrote a piece for the weekly newspaper Die Zeit in which he argued against ‘deferral scenarios for the euro’ and, in this context, criticized the minister presidents Edmund Stoiber, Kurt Biedenkopf and Gerhard Schröder.

Laschet also drew notice as a result of his participation in regular meetings at Sassella, an Italian restaurant in the Bonn district of Kessenich. Young Bundestag members of the CDU and Green Party gathered there in a relaxed atmosphere, in part to toss around ideas for cooperation between the two parties. When news of these meetings became public, the group was referred to as the ‘pizza connection”. Amongst others, it included CDU members Ronald Pofalla, Hermann Gröhe, Norbert Röttgen, Peter Altmaier, Thomas Rachel and Eckart von Klaeden. The Green Party members included Andrea Fischer, Volker Beck, Matthias Berninger, Oswald Metzger, Christine Scheel and Cem Özdemir.

When the sixteen-year chancellorship of Helmut Kohl came to an end, so too did Laschet's career in the Bundestag, at least for the time being. Ulla Schmidt won the direct mandate in Aachen for the Social Democrats and Laschet, at fortieth place on the state party list of the North Rhine-Westphalia CDU, had no other way of gaining a seat in the German parliament.

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Member of the European Parliament

In addition to serving as a member of the Bundestag, Laschet had been employed as publishing director and general manager of the Catholic publishing house Einhard Verlag since 1995. Given this source of income, the loss of the Bundestag mandate did not have drastic financial consequences for him. His involvement in politics was now solely in an honorary capacity; he served as a city councillor in Aachen. On 20 November 1998, in a run-off election held in the former Kolping House in Düren, Laschet edged out his rival, the Heinsberg native Hans-Josef Heuter (54 votes to 53 votes), and secured a spot for the Aachen district CDU on the state list of CDU candidates for the European Parliament election.

In the fifth direct elections to the European Parliament on 13 June 1999, the Union parties (CDU and CSU) garnered 48.7 percent of the vote, a gain of almost 10 percent over the previous ballot. The CDU/CSU group in Strasbourg now numbered 53 members, including Laschet, who viewed himself as a custodian of the European legacy built by Helmut Kohl. As it happened, just a few months after the election, the former chancellor was dominating the headlines in Germany. The CDU donations scandal (Spendenaffäre) had blown up, and Laschet stated his position on the matter in an opinion piece for the Aachener Zeitung daily newspaper. His short essay was a reflection of the dilemma in which CDU members found themselves at the time. Kohl’s refusal to name the sources of certain donations to the CDU because he had given his word of honour to safeguard their confidentiality was, Laschet wrote, ‘unacceptable, even for one of the greatest German statesmen of the century’. Nevertheless, as he concluded in the final sentence of his editorial, ‘his picture still hangs in my office’.

In May 2000, Laschet expressed his approval of the speech on European integration that Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, of the Green Party, had delivered that month at the Humboldt University in Berlin, because it ‘finally brought some life back to the almost defunct public discussion on the long-term future of the European model’. In those years, Laschet saw himself as paving the way for CDU-Green Party alliances over and above the cooperation of the two parties at the local level. Laschet’s appreciative words for Fischer’s European policy were also meant in that context. After the Bundestag election of 2002, which the CDU and CSU lost by a slender margin, Laschet (then still a member of the European Parliament) called on his party to ‘free itself from its Babylonian fixation on the FDP’.

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Minister in the Government of North Rhine-Westphalia

In North Rhine-Westphalia, however, the FDP (Free Democratic Party) remained the CDU’s preferred coalition partner. After the clear CDU win in the Landtag election of 22 May 2005, the two parties formed a coalition and finally relegated the SPD to the opposition, ending its continuous, 39-year run at the helm of state government.

When the CDU’s successful lead candidate, Jürgen Rüttgers, put together his cabinet, Armin Laschet was given a ministerial post with responsibility for the newly created portfolio of Intergenerational Affairs, Family, Women and Integration. He quickly gained a high profile nationwide as ‘Germany's first minister of integration’. Profiles of him appeared in important print media, such as Süddeutsche Zeitung and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which was fairly unusual for a minister in state government.

In his very first year in office, Laschet produced the ‘Plan of Action for Integration’, which focused on training and education for the generation of children born to immigrants. Education, it noted, is ultimately ‘the key to integration’, and the plan therefore included elements such as preschool language training for children at four years of age, an increase in the number of all-day schools, and up-to-date initiatives to promote social coexistence at the local level. In addition to improved integration in education and the job market, the plan also emphasized the importance of better social integration, including a focus on protecting women from forced marriage. Laschet referred to it as a ‘programme unlike any other nationwide’. And the state of North Rhine-Westphalia would use it, he said, to ‘carry out its transformation from an industrial society to a knowledge-based society in the field of integration policy, too’.

This plan of action also called for a right of residence for a class of foreigners who are legally obligated to leave Germany but whose deportation has been suspended for years (their residence is geduldet, literally ‘tolerated’). Partly for this reason, the response to the plan was not uniformly positive, not least in Laschet's own party. It was said, for instance, that he was pursuing other responsibilities of his department only half-heartedly. Critics pointed to the Kinderbildungsgesetz (Child Education Act), a central concern of the Rüttgers government. And it was true that not everything went smoothly between the time the draft bill was presented and its enactment by the state parliament. Despite such criticism, however, Laschet became the most popular minister in the government between 2005 and 2010. As early as September 2006, in fact, the Rheinische Post was calling him the political heir of Minister President Rüttgers, and his stature in the CDU also rose when he was elected to the party’s national committee for the first time in 2008.

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Setback and Comeback: Chairman of the CDU and the CDU Landtag Group in North Rhine-Westphalia

In the Landtag election of 9 May 2010, the CDU lost 10.2 percentage points and suffered its worst result to date with only 34.6 percent of the vote. There were various reasons for this drubbing at the polls. One of them was that, in the first Landtag election following the Bundestag election of September 2009, the CDU in North Rhine-Westphalia was being punished for the early missteps of the CDU-FDP coalition in Berlin. Voters were also disconcerted by the Greek bailout, which amounted to billions of euros borne by the taxpayer, and by turmoil in the state branch of the CDU, which had ousted General Secretary Hendrik Wüst just a few months before the Landtag election.

After the Landtag election, Social Democrat Hannelore Kraft formed an SPD-Green Party minority government, and the CDU found itself in the opposition. As the party voted in new leaders, Armin Laschet suffered two stinging defeats. First, he was defeated by the narrowest of margins – 32 to 34 votes – by Karl-Josef Laumann (until then the state minister of labour, health and social affairs) in the election for the new chairman of the CDU group in the Landtag. And then he failed in his attempt to succeed Jürgen Rüttgers as state party chairman. In a poll of the membership, he lost to Norbert Röttgen, the federal minister of the environment, who picked up 54.8 percent of the votes cast. Laschet was left with the role of deputy chairman – in the state party as well as the CDU group in the Landtag. He also took over the office of parliamentary secretary. Laschet found it difficult to reconcile himself with the role of managing the Landtag group, however. He entertained thoughts of leaving politics but ultimately persevered and, at the second attempt, became chairman of the party in North Rhine-Westphalia, the largest in terms of membership, in the summer of 2012.

After running an ill-fated campaign, the CDU had suffered a historic defeat in the early Landtag election of 13 May 2012. The party won 26.3 percent of the vote, which was its worst result in elections to the state parliament since 1947. The party's lead candidate, Norbert Röttgen, accepted political responsibility for the defeat and stepped down as state party chairman. Laschet was chosen to succeed him at a state party conference held in Krefeld on 1 July 2012. In December of the same year, at the 25th conference of the federal CDU in Hanover, Laschet again followed in Röttgen's footsteps and became a federal deputy chairman of the party.

In North Rhine-Westphalia, Laschet initially had to share power with Laumann, who had been re-elected as chairman of the CDU Landtag group. After the Bundestag election of 2013, however, Chancellor Angela Merkel appointed Laumann to a post in Berlin with permanent civil servant status: he became state secretary in the Federal Ministry of Health and federal government commissioner for patients' affairs. The author of this turn of events was Peter Hintze, who had been pulling strings behind the scenes. The influential leader of the North Rhine-Westphalian members of the CDU/CSU Bundestag group was a confidant of Angela Merkel’s. Over the decades, he had also become one of the most important people to whom Laschet turned for counsel. When he died in November 2016, Laschet lost a trusted friend and reliable advisor. The tweet posted by Laschet on 25 April 2020, which would have been Hintze's 70th birthday, spoke for itself: ‘If there is one thing I sorely miss, in both my personal life and political career, it is the meetings and long phone conversations with Peter Hintze. He was inspiring, motivating, judicious, smart, candid, eager to discuss things, funny and above all discreet’.

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New CDU Line-Up in North Rhine-Westphalia

When Laumann took on his new role in Berlin, ‘Laschet [was] alone in the cockpit of the NRW CDU’, as a headline in the Rheinische Post put it. He took advantage of this opportunity to reorient the state party and the Landtag group by making some new appointments and updates to CDU policy. At the state CDU headquarters, he put historian Guido Hitze in charge of the Policy and Strategy Department. Hitze had previously been employed at the Landeszentrale für politische Bildung (State Centre for Civic Education). Before that, he had worked at the State Chancellery under Rüttgers and at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation for many years before that. Now he was tasked with bringing the party platform up to date. This process concluded in 2015 with the adoption of a political platform at the state party conference in Essen. The document that summarized the policy principles of the North Rhine-Westphalia CDU was titled ‘Advancement, Security, Prospects – The North Rhine-Westphalia Programme’. It was the first political programme to be adopted by the North Rhine-Westphalia branch of the CDU, which was founded in 1986.

In 2014, Laschet made a providential hire when he appointed historian and political scientist Nathanael Liminski as parliamentary secretary. Liminski was born in Bonn in 1985, but despite his relative youth, he had accumulated an impressive amount of professional experience: he had worked as a speech writer for Minister President Roland Koch in Hesse and as an adviser to the executive staff at the Federal Ministry of Defence and the Federal Ministry of the Interior. Liminski became the chief strategist behind the CDU Landtag win and the resulting change of government in North Rhine-Westphalia in 2017. At the same time, he became the most important member of staff for Laschet, now chairman both of the state party and of its Landtag group. The Rheinische Post described Liminski as ‘Armin Laschet's man in the shadows’. Monthly magazine Cicero even saw him as ‘Laschet's Kanzlermacher [chancellor-maker]’.

Without losing sight of the State Chancellery in Düsseldorf, Laschet was now increasingly appearing on the political stage in Berlin. More than anything, he took a stand on refugee policy, which was the dominant political issue of this period. Bringing to bear his authority as chairman of the important North Rhine-Westphalian branch of the CDU, he defended Federal CDU Chairwoman and Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose refugee policy he expressly supported. In the press, he was referred to as the ‘praetorian of the chancellor’ (Die Welt). For Laschet, a devout Christian, there was no alternative to a humanitarian refugee policy; it was, for him, an imperative of Christian charity. In the emotionally charged public debate, Laschet urged a change in perspective: ‘... away from the emphasis on problems – and toward a recognition of the potential’. In view of the global challenges, he also warned against ‘withdrawal into a nationalist shell’ and, in February 2016, presented proposals for ‘a new stage of European integration’ in central policy areas.

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Minister President of North Rhine-Westphalia

After the favourable Landtag election of 14 May 2017, Laschet stepped into the role of minister president, and his standing in the CDU and CSU continued to grow. With gains of almost seven percentage points, the CDU again became the strongest political party with 33.0 percent of the vote. In coalition with the FDP, which had increased its share of the vote to 12.6 percent, it succeeded in forcing out the governing SPD and Green Party. As seen in the elections held a few weeks earlier in Saarland and Schleswig-Holstein, the SPD was in a general downwards trend. In North Rhine-Westphalia, it lost almost eight percentage points compared with its total in 2012. Other reasons for the result included the more disciplined messaging of the CDU this time around, the weak record of the SPD-Green Party coalition government in its most recent term (there was a great deal of unfinished business in education and transportation policy), and signs that Minister President Hannelore Kraft, of the Social Democrats, was growing tired of the leadership role in Düsseldorf.

The economy had been booming for years, and with a steady flow of tax revenue, the new government got off to a good start: it fulfilled key campaign promises, such as a pledge for larger and better equipped police forces; and in 2018, it presented the first balanced budget since 1973, which also made for good headlines. The work of the CDU-FDP government proceeded without a hitch, in large part because of the governing style of Minister President Laschet, who allowed his smaller coalition partner opportunities to shape policy and gain visibility. Just as it had in the coalition governments with the CDU under Minister Presidents Franz Meyers and Jürgen Rüttgers, the FDP proved to be a reliable partner. As the good results in Düsseldorf showed, CDU-FDP coalitions remained a good alternative to CDU-Green Party alliances.

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On the National Political Stage

Having won the election and assumed the office of minister president in Germany’s most populous state, Laschet gained political stature within the CDU. He soon had ample opportunity to exercise this influence. The successes of the right-wing populist AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) at the ballot box, as well as the sometimes painful losses incurred by the CDU at all political levels, were increasingly fuelling debate within the party over its general direction following the Bundestag election of 2017. In these discussions, Laschet warned his party against any shift to the right and emphasized the character of the CDU as a mainstream party of the political centre. He repeatedly declared ‘that the essence of the Christian Democratic Union brand is not conservatism but rather, more than anything, the Christian view of humanity’.

The Union parties suffered heavy losses in the Landtag elections in Bavaria and Hesse, and in October 2018 Angela Merkel announced that she would no longer seek the position of party leader at the upcoming federal party conference in Hamburg. The decision took Laschet by surprise. The CDU general secretary, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, the federal minister of health, Jens Spahn, and the former chairman of the CDU/CSU group in the Bundestag, Friedrich Merz, all immediately announced their interest in the position, but Laschet hesitated and ultimately decided not to throw his hat into the ring. At the time, there seemed too great a risk that defeat would damage him in North Rhine-Westphalia, while victory would require him to perform duties in Berlin as well as those in Düsseldorf, leaving him a spent force by the next Bundestag election after three long years in the shadow of the chancellor.

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The Power Struggle Between Laschet and Söder for the Chancellor Candidacy

In the run-up to the vote, Laschet had left no-one in any doubt that if he were elected party chairman, he would also want to stand as the Union parties’ candidate for chancellor in the federal election on 26 September 2021. Between Easter and Whitsun in 2021, he sought to discuss the matter with Markus Söder, the CSU chairman and minister president of Bavaria, in order to present a joint proposal for the CDU/CSU chancellor candidate.

However, the conversation between the two party leaders in mid-April produced no such result. Instead it became apparent, at a meeting of the executive committee of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group in the Bundestag on 11 April 2021, that both Laschet and Söder wanted to run. As had happened in the run-up to the federal elections of 1980 and 2002, both parties put forward a prospective candidate for nomination.

The meeting of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group on 11 April was followed by a broader discussion about which of them was best suited to run. This spread through both parties at every level, including the parliamentary group, with both protagonists taking an active part. The final act of the bitter power struggle for the chancellor candidacy took place in the national executive committee of the CDU.

In a late-night session on 19 April, which went on for many hours, 31 of the 46 committee members voted for Laschet as chancellor candidate, with nine in favour of Söder and six abstaining. The national executive committee is the leadership of the CDU. Its members are elected by the 1001 delegates to the national party conference, thus reflecting the breadth of opinion within the CDU. It includes representatives from politics at every level: local, state, federal and European. The party’s regional branches are represented individually, as are its associations and special organisations.

In Munich, Markus Söder seemed to have accepted the clear result of the vote in the CDU national executive committee, stating at around midday on 20 April 2021: ‘The die is cast. Armin Laschet will be the Union’s candidate for chancellor’. But peace did not really return to the Union parties after this decision. The CSU general secretary, Markus Blume, insisted that Söder was the candidate that people wanted in their hearts. And the vote in favour of Laschet drew criticism from within the CDU as well, especially from its branches in the eastern states.

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Candidate, but Not Chancellor

Among the grassroots of the party, there were deep doubts about the prospects of an election campaign centred on Laschet, whose nomination as the chancellor candidate was seen by many as flying in the face of the opinion polls, the public mood, and the election issues. It was hoped that the state election in Saxony-Anhalt at the beginning of June 2021 would give a boost to the campaign, but this did not materialize, although the CDU gained 7.3 percent on its 2016 election result and, with a 37.1 percent share of the vote, consolidated its position as the strongest party in the state parliament. The credit for that victory, however, went to the popular minister president, Reiner Haseloff.

Laschet found it difficult to define a political agenda that clearly bore his own stamp. When he presented the joint election manifesto of the CDU and CSU with Söder in mid-June, he had to put up with the accusation of offering ‘a Merkel programme’ (Die Welt, 22 June 2021).

Politics lives from images – especially during election campaigns. When disastrous floods hit large swathes of North Rhine-Westphalia and the northern Rhineland-Palatinate in July 2021, chance gave rise to one memorable scene that completely wrong-footed Laschet’s election campaign. It was not the image of the ‘state’s father figure in wellies’ (Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 16 July 2021), who went to the places affected, listened to the local residents and arranged for help to be given, that entered the public consciousness. What stuck in people’s minds instead was the image of Laschet in Erftstadt, laughing while Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, a few metres away, was consoling victims of the flooding.

Soon afterwards, Laschet found himself dogged by allegations of plagiarism and had to admit to omissions in the source references of his book Die Aufsteigerrepublik. Zuwanderung als Chance [The achiever republic. Immigration as an opportunity] from 2009. By this time, it was not just his personal approval ratings that were sinking. In the wake of his downward trend, the poll figures for the Union parties also collapsed. The SPD, on the other hand, consolidated its lead in the opinion polls from mid-August onwards. In view of the Union’s dwindling chances of holding onto power, it seemed like an act of desperation when Laschet announced his planned cabinet three weeks before the elections, calling it his ‘team for the future’. This, too, failed to turn the tide.

In the Bundestag elections on 26 September 2021, the Union parties achieved their worst ever result at the federal level. Together the CDU and CSU only achieved a 24.1 percent share of the vote: a loss of 8.8 points from the 2017 election. They were even overtaken by the SPD, which gained 5.2 points to gain a 25.7 percent share of the vote. The responsibility for the historic electoral defeat of the CDU and CSU did not lie solely with Armin Laschet, even though he was clearly the wrong candidate for chancellor, as the analysis carried out by the electoral research group has shown. Voters gave him low ratings for his abilities in every area, on top of which he had a serious image problem. A perceived lack of expertise in important areas was another major reason for the election debacle of the CDU and CSU, which lost considerable ground not only on the major issues of the economy and taking the country into the future. The Union parties also lagged behind the SPD when it came to the issues of pensions and education.

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A Step Back from Front-Line Politics

Laschet took political responsibility for the election debacle. On 16 October 2021, addressing the national conference of the Junge Union, he declared ‘Nothing should be glossed over. As the party chairman and as the candidate for chancellor, I bear the responsibility for this result. I – and nobody else – have to accept responsibility for the election campaign’.

Despite the heavy election losses, Laschet tried to forge a government coalition with the Free Democrats and the Greens, but failed due to a lack of confidence among his own ranks.

In consequence, Laschet announced that he would resign as national chairman of the CDU. He hoped that this would promote an amicable transition, similar to the way in which he had preserved his political legacy in North Rhine-Westphalia. In Düsseldorf, he had managed to get all the main players in the party and the parliamentary group to agree on a joint proposal for his successor as the state party chairman and in the office of minister president. The minister of transport, Hendrik Wüst, had inherited Laschet’s positions both as chairman of the CDU’s largest regional association and as minister president of Germany’s most populous federal state.

The national party chairmanship, however, was now claimed by three candidates: Helge Braun, Friedrich Merz and Norbert Röttgen. Laschet's plan to arrange things behind closed doors came to naught. Instead, the CDU invited its almost 400,000 members to take part in deciding the party’s next national chairman.

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Back to the Roots – Armin Laschet as Foreign Policy Expert in the Bundestag

After being nominated as the chancellor candidate, Laschet had announced that, regardless of the outcome of the election, he would switch from regional politics in North Rhine-Westphalia to national politics after 26 September 2021. As a full member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, he will spend the twentieth legislative session of the Bundestag working in a political field in which he has already accumulated a great deal of experience.

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A Politician with a Clear Moral Compass

Armin Laschet is a politician with experience gathered over more than three decades of political activity at every level, be it local politics in Aachen, membership of the Bundestag or of the European Parliament, or political work at state level in North Rhine-Westphalia. In the course of his career, Laschet has enjoyed great victories, but he has also had to accept painful defeats without letting them throw him off course. It is in this that the Christian's tranquillity and composure in politics becomes evident. Laschet’s approach to politics is rooted in his Christian faith. It offers him a clear moral compass. Liberal democracy as enshrined in Germany’s Basic Law, the social market economy as an economic and social model, Franco-German friendship, the process of European integration, and Germany’s reconciliation with Israel: these are values and principles that Laschet will never sacrifice for the sake of short-term opportunism or party-political expediency.

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The original german text was translated into English by Richard Toovey.