The CDU is facing a three-way battle for power at the top of the party.
At the end of the application period on Wednesday at 6 p.m., according to information from the German Press Agency, only the duly nominations of the former Union parliamentary group leader Friedrich Merz, the foreign politician Norbert Röttgen and the executive head of the Chancellery, Helge Braun, were available.
For Merz it is the third application for the party chairmanship of the CDU.
In 2018 he was narrowly defeated by the former CDU chairwoman Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, and at the beginning of this year in a runoff election to the outgoing chairman Armin Laschet.
All three had been proposed by their district associations for the preliminary questioning of around 400,000 CDU members, which began at the beginning of December.