Some CDU politicians are currently giving the impression that they would prefer to have two candidates for chancellor.

One until September 26th, the day of the federal election, and one for the time thereafter.

Even the supporters of the CDU chairman Armin Laschet, who secretly accuse his competitor Markus Söder, who lost out in the fight for the candidate for chancellor, to great agility, even question his suitability for chancellor or resent the CSU boss his taunts against Laschet and prefer him to Söder Sowing the Chancellery, there is one thing that cannot be ignored: unlike Söder, Laschet has a problem with its effectiveness.

Pure burger

Political correspondent in North Rhine-Westphalia.

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    Eckart Lohse

    Head of the parliamentary editorial office in Berlin.

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      This is existentially threatening on the way to the election.

      The Prime Minister of Saxony-Anhalt, Reiner Haseloff, who is the first CDU man to pass a state election after the candidate's decision and wants to defend his office at the beginning of June, recently put it in the FAZ: He did not openly advertise Söder as candidate for chancellor.

      However, he pointed out that in a democracy a majority of votes was required to get into office.

      Even four weeks after the decision in favor of Laschet, the surveys for the CDU leader are still far from lulling his party friends into the certainty that this will work.

      Can Laschet Instagram and Twitter?

      Armin Laschet is the first Union politician who has to stand for candidacy in the age of Twitter and Instagram without the bonus of already being chancellor. When Angela Merkel first fought for chancellorship in 2005, it would be two years before the iPhone came onto the market in Germany and paved the way for the great battle in social networks, which now play an important role as campaign stages. For a sixty-year-old man, this is an additional challenge to the already high hurdles that have to be overcome on the way to the Chancellery.

      Because men of his age often do not function as naturally in social networks as younger people. Laschet has around 148,000 followers on Twitter. His challenger Annalena Baerbock from the Greens, who has been ahead of him in the polls for four weeks, is followed by 271,000 Twitter users. In the Instagram online service, which is fixed on images, Laschet has 64,000 followers, Baerbock 222,000. Even on Facebook, which is widely used by people of Laschet's age, Baerbock is still slightly ahead.

      But not only the forty-year-old Green Chancellor candidate is in front of Laschet, but also Söder, who is only six years younger than the Prime Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia.

      Söder even hangs out from Baerbock on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.

      The worst joke so far by Bavaria, who is still licking its wounds, against the North Rhine-Westphalian Prime Minister, was the warning in the Süddeutsche Zeitung immediately after the decision to run Laschet that the Union should not make a policy of "Helmut Kohl 2.0" because that would be old-fashioned.

      He had been asked what made his offer different from the Laschet's.

      Söder should not only have meant the content, but also pursued the goal of portraying the candidate himself as having fallen out of time.

      Low blow from the Chancellor

      Laschet fights in the media for his public perception in the hope that it will result in support. He does this intensively on television, without being afraid of talk show appearances, even if he knows that he cannot count on friendly questions. A year ago, Laschet was unable to convey his request to keep an eye on the way back to normal in addition to the restrictions in the fight against the pandemic.