Wolfgang Münchau Wolfgang Münchau

Is this the man who will replace Angela Merkel?

Markus Söder is not running for CDU chairman – but he has his eyes on the chancellery

Fancy that: Markus Söder dressed as Marilyn Monroe for Bavaria’s carnival

Markus Söder is the one to watch in German politics. The ascent of the Bavarian Minister-President and leader of the Bavarian Christian Social Union is probably the closest modern Germany has come to Macron-style disruption. The situation is less dramatic than France in 2017 — there is no great disaffection with Chancellor Angela Merkel or with politics in general — but there is a sense that the country needs a shift in direction.

Bavaria symbolises that new direction. When I grew up in Germany’s deep west in the 1960s and 1970s, we went to Bavaria on holiday and admired its quaint backwardness. We did not take it very seriously until the Munich Olympics in 1972. Since then, this vast rural state has turned itself into the centre of Germany’s hi-tech industries, located mostly around state capital Munich.

Mr Söder is not particularly known as a tech guru himself, but he is distinctly modern in his approach to politics. His main competitor to succeed Mrs Merkel will be the next chairman of the Christian Democratic Union. There are three candidates for that post, but the reason Mr Söder is even considered for Mrs Merkel’s job is that none of the three is a compelling and obvious choice.

He has often been photographed in fancy dress, disguised as Marilyn Monroe, or Shrek or Gandalf

Each one of them stands for a different version of the past. Armin Laschet, Minister-President of North-Rhine Westphalia, is a coal guy who recently managed to commission a new coal-fired power station. Friedrich Merz, leader of the CDU in the Bundestag 20 years ago, is modelling himself on Ludwig Erhard, Germany’s post-war economics minister. Norbert Röttgen, head of the Bundestag’s foreign affairs committee, is an old-fashioned transatlanticist. An Anglophile, he is one of the few German politicians with a good knowledge of British politics, but better known inside London think tanks than on German streets.

Mr Söder owes his ascent to his sure-footed handling of the pandemic.

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