Jens Spahn will probably be the Union leader in the Bundestag
Political careers are everything, just not planned – unless they are called Jens Spahn. At the age of 22, Member of the Bundestag, with 35 State Secretary, with 38 ministers, and now the man of the future in the CDU. The man after Friedrich Merz.
It has not yet been confirmed, but it is reportedly that the trained banker, who later studied politics during distance learning, could Bundestag Become an office that would secure attention and influence on almost all political decisions in the federal government. As a minister in the Merz cabinet, Spahn would only be responsible for his own specialist area, as the leader of the strongest government faction, on the other hand, he was sitting in all important rounds at the table – the perfect starting ramp for a candidate for chancellor after the Merz era, however long it may take. North Rhine-Westphalia’s Prime Minister Hendrik Wüst should not like this, but a parliamentary group leader Spahn would not only be the feeling, but the factual number two in the CDU. He was sitting at a central switching point of the coalition and not far away in the State Chancellery in Düsseldorf.
For a long time, the 44-year-old Spahn was only considered an outsider in the race for the parliamentary group chair, self-confident, but difficult to convey. Merz would rather be a minister in his cabinet and thus a little better under control, it was said until a few days ago – a delicate allusion to the ambition from Spahn, who has already felt Merz. Before the party congress in December 2018 in Hamburg, when it comes to the successor of Angela Merkel At the top of the CDU, he had unsuccessfully tried to dissuade Spahn from his own candidacy and bring it to his team. In the end, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer triumphed about the supposed favorite Merz. The candidate Spahn only landed in third place, But then moved to the CDU Presidium with a better result of 89 percent.
The CSU agrees to Jens Spahn
In the meantime, Merz and Spahn have made their peace together and allegedly also received the blessing of CSU boss Markus Söder for the rise of the former Minister of Health to the top of the parliamentary group. « Now it depends on what he makes of it, » says a veteran CSU man. Does the new see himself as a kind of secondary chancellor, power -conscious and ambitious – or as a loyal to work for the Chancellor? The ridge in between is narrow. On the one hand, the Union faction does not want to be a abnick club and not a second Volker Kauder, who always understood as an extended arm of Angela Merkel in parliament. However, constant muscle games between the faction and the government are not in the sense of the 208 MPs.
In the parliamentary group, the fact that the tight conservative spahn is one of the largest political talents in the Union, eloquent, controversial, controversial, topic -safe and well networked. His present, offensive, often also polarizing species, not everyone there. In the coalition negotiations with the SPD In addition to the CSU state group chairman Alexander Dobrindt and CDU general secretary Carsten Linnemann, the man from the Münsterland was nevertheless the most important ally of Merz. Finally, Spahn even sounded like the future chancellor when he emphasized in an interview, the Union and the SPD should have a common goal – namely that AfD to shrink with good government work for half a size. This was exactly what Merz said almost word equal in 2018.
The SPD follows Jens Spahn’s appearances with skepticism
In the future coalition partner, on the other hand, Spahn is already through below, especially because of his views on the AfD. She understood his proposal not to further ignore the right -wing populists in the awarding of committee residues in the Bundestag that he wanted to normalize the AfD, for example, the former parliamentary president Bärbel BAS. « And I can only warn against it. » Spahn, on the other hand, claims that he had not put the word « normalization » in his mouth. Politics must also recognize how many millions of Germans have chosen the AfD. The echo on his advance was still so critical that he does not want to follow it any further.
Spahn is still silent about his own ambitions. However, his classmates at the Episcopal Canisius School in Ahaus had an early idea of where it could take her student spokesman Jens. They wrote at Spahn in the Abitur newspaper in 1999: « Chancellor, what else? »
