Conservative Friedrich Merz shattered a political taboo. His blunder gives the centre-left a chance in the 23 February election<\/p>\n
There are moments in every election campaign when the fate of a key protagonist takes a decisive turn, often after an unforced error. There was Rishi Sunak\u2019s overly hasty return<\/a> from D-day commemorations in France for a TV interview, and, in Germany, Armin Laschet\u2019s unfortunate laughter<\/a> during a 2021 visit to a flooded town that marked the beginning of the end for the then Christian Democratic Union (CDU) frontrunner.<\/p>\n The current CDU leader, Friedrich Merz, who is the polls\u2019 favourite<\/a> to become the next chancellor after Germany\u2019s general election on 23 February, may have had his moment of truth when his proposed crackdown on asylum seekers was narrowly passed<\/a> by the Bundestag with the full support of the far-right Alternative f\u00fcr Deutschland (AfD).<\/p>\n Florian Ranft is a member of the management board at Das Progressive Zentrum, a thinktank based in Berlin<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Conservative Friedrich Merz shattered a political taboo. His blunder gives the centre-left a chance in the 23 February election There are moments in every election campaign when the fate of a key protagonist takes a decisive turn, often after an unforced error. There was Rishi Sunak\u2019s overly hasty return from D-day commemorations in France for … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33036"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33036\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}