Norbert Röttgen is not a household name in Germany, let alone beyond it, but today he became one of the most significant figures in the country’s – and perhaps even Europe’s – politics. The independent-minded head of the Bundestag’s foreign affairs committee surprised many in Berlin by announcing his candidacy for the leadership of the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU). The contest has not yet officially started: Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, the CDU’s beleaguered leader and erstwhile frontrunner to succeed Angela Merkel, has announced her resignation but not its timing. And Röttgen, whose renown is greater among the foreign-policy Twitterati than it is in his own party, is unlikely to win it. But his participation promises to improve the quality of the debate – and bring a new worldliness to Germany’s political stage in the coming months.
That is welcome and necessary. The politics of Europe’s largest economy – and what should be the continent’s geopolitical keystone – can be exasperatingly parochial. Where turbulent events rage in the outside world, the German political establishment spends astonishing amounts of time and attention on petty squabbles, low-rent imitations of American culture wars and relitigations of old arguments and rivalries. Much of this is personified in the candidacy of former CDU parliamentary head Friedrich Merz, a cadaverous spectre from the federal republic’s political past who lost a power struggle with Merkel in 2002 and has returned in the twilight of her chancellorship, sculpting the unreconstructed politics of that bygone era into pseudo-populist provocations for the Twitter age.
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