Three politicians vying for the highest position in German politics clashed in a televised debate. In this debate, Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic leader failed to regain the lost momentum and put The role of the continuity candidate was given to his center-left rival.
Opinion polls released before the first of the three television debates show leading competition Germany Entering the post-Merkel era is more open than ever. Olaf Scholz’s SPD leads Armin Laschet’s CDU by a narrow margin, and Annalena Baerbock’s Green Party is closely followed by third.
A quick poll of viewers after the show showed that Sunday’s debate had little effect on changing voters’ perceptions, with 36% declared Scholz’s victory, ahead of Baerbock’s 30% and Laschet’s 25%.
In a two-hour debate, discussing the war in Afghanistan, the future use of military drones, the climate crisis, measures to contain Covid-19, and the use of gender-neutral pronouns, Baerbock and Laschet continued to make up for lost ground.
Rashet’s CDU has lost about 15 percentage points in opinion polls since the beginning of this year. He described the recent events in Afghanistan as a “disaster” not only for Western allies but also for the German government— -Implying that he wants to succeed.
As the most active and talkative of the three candidates in the Sunday debate, he accused the resurgent Social Democratic Party of preventing the German army from being equipped with the most advanced hardware, and warned the Green Party of plans to burden companies with environmental restrictions and higher taxes. . .
Sometimes, Raschelt’s energetic but lengthy performance seemed to emphasize rather than eliminate tensions within the CDU party: the governor of North Rhine Westphalia downplayed in his concluding statement, he tried to put his own ” “Resoluteness in severe weather” is likened to “the whole country has experienced the wind of change.”
Baerbock has been trying to recover from allegations of tampering with resumes and plagiarizing paragraphs in her book, and she has tried to update her position as an outspoken candidate for change and reform.
“Years of waiting and watching under the Grand Alliance will not do any good for this country,” she said of the power-sharing arrangements between the CDU and the Social Democratic Party, which ruled Germany for the past eight years. “We need a real new start.”
Balbok criticized Merkel’s government for ignoring children and families during the pandemic, and accused her rivals of circumventing the petrol and diesel engine car ban she hopes to implement in 2030. The 40-year-old Green Union leader was the only candidate among the three candidates who did not explicitly exclude certain occupations from being vaccinated against Covid-19, saying that “this possibility should not be ruled out in the future”.
At the same time, Schultz seems to be more conservative, because his competitors tore each other, chose a slower, Merkelian answer, and conducted a historic sweep. The Minister of Finance and the Deputy Prime Minister repeatedly reminded the “Prime Minister and I” in their statements to agree on various issues.
Raschelt tried to accuse Schultz of bluffing, accusing him of “behaving like Angela Merkel and speaking like Saskia Esken”, and conservatives discovered that she was the totem representative of the party’s left wing.
The CDU candidate tried to force his SPD opponent to exclude the alliance with the Green Party and the left-wing Die Linke, but failed to obtain a decisive blow. Schultz, from the right wing of the Social Democratic Party, evaded the challenge and refused to rule out an option he could use as a bargaining chip in the upcoming alliance negotiations.
