In the end, Armin Laschet is alone again.

Without Merkel, without Söder.

That means: the chancellor candidate is not alone on this warm Saturday afternoon in the extreme southwest of Berlin.

A few dozen party friends received him in Kladow to take part in the doorstep election campaign.

Laschet is accompanied by the Spandau Bundestag candidate Joe Chialo, the top candidate for the Berlin House of Representatives election, Kai Wegner, party friends and journalists.

40, maybe 50 people push their way through the quiet streets of Kladow.

Eckart Lohse

Head of the parliamentary editorial office in Berlin.

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The CDU had a look at the area beforehand, you know where you will be elected and where you will not be elected.

They also checked a bit to see if someone was at home.

But things are still not going completely smoothly.

Sometimes the front door opens, sometimes it stays closed, sometimes a woman only opens a crack and closes the door as soon as she has seen the crowd in front of her house.

Machine-like applause

Before Laschet rings the doorbell in Kladow, he is in Kreuzberg, in the Tempodrom. A few hundred meters away from the party headquarters of the SPD, the CDU and CSU meet at the start of the so-called hot election campaign phase. Apart from the party celebrities - in addition to Laschet, especially the Federal Chancellor and the Bavarian Prime Minister - there are around 70 young people in T-shirts and open shirts in the hall, clapping so machine-like that the question arises whether this is possible in times of the pandemic could not have solved just as well with the help of artificial intelligence.

When Angela Merkel appears on stage in a yellow blazer a few minutes after 11 a.m., she reminds us that she has stayed out of election campaigns since she announced her withdrawal in autumn 2018.

“Everything has its time,” she says in a typical Merkel sentence.

Then she claims that she still thinks it's “really nice” to be there.

It remains to be seen how nice Merkel, who was never an enthusiastic campaigner, finds this appointment on the weekend between her trips to Moscow on Friday and to Kiev on Sunday.

But she fulfills her duty as a CDU politician and still a popular chancellor.

She praises Laschet, for whom the “C” in the party name is “compass”, who acts on the basis of a Christian image of man and for whom the focus is on man with his “inviolable dignity”.

She calls him the "future Federal Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany".

But then she extensively acknowledges the performance of the current Federal Chancellor, mentions the sharp drop in unemployment figures during her term of office, the end of new debt - until Corona came - the euro rescue, the strong increase in electricity from renewable energy sources.

Of course she also talks about the “tragedy” in Afghanistan.

At best, a decent relationship

Merkel and Laschet, that was and is, at best, a decent relationship. Not more. Even if the North Rhine-Westphalian Prime Minister stood on the side of the Chancellor in 2015 and in the years after the refugee crisis, this did not even result in the closeness that existed between her and the Saarland Prime Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer until both women were disappointed with each other was.

When it came to succeeding Kramp-Karrenbauer in the CDU chairmanship and thus always also to the chancellorship, Merkel behaved even more cautiously than before in party matters, including the applicant Laschet. Only once, a year ago, when it was unclear whether Laschet would make it to the top of the CDU, she made a noticeable exception. She visited the North Rhine-Westphalian Prime Minister in Düsseldorf and said that anyone who wants to become CDU chairman must also be ready to become Chancellor. If someone rules the most populous federal state with an efficiently working coalition of the CDU and FDP, "then at least that is an armament that is definitely important".

But Merkel left it at that. Or rather: she was not afraid to throw Laschet clubs between the legs, for example when she criticized his corona policy on a talk show in front of an audience of millions. When in April the CDU executive board argued for an evening about who should become a candidate for chancellor, Merkel boomed in silence. Merkel also stayed almost completely out of the final phase of the election campaign until Saturday. She leaves it at the participation in the opening and the final rally. The CDU would be happy to have more commitment, but it doesn't look like that.