Henriette Reker shares his status as a “confessional hybrid” with Markus Söder, who is Bavaria's second Evangelical Prime Minister after Günther Beckstein and who, with his rapprochement with the Greens, has imported the ecumenical ethos of dialogue into Christian-social party politics.
As much as Söder's habitus differs from the divisive fundamentalism of the strictly Catholic Franz Josef Strauss, Reker's predilection for multicultural understanding stands out from the baroque colourfulness that was specific to Rhenish Catholicism in the old Federal Republic.