Merkel's time is almost up. The German "mini-Merkel" has now saved the legacy of the Chancellor.

SAARBRÜCKEN, Germany – She succeeds to the dreams of Angela Merkel, who must remind the German Chancellor of a younger version of herself.

A woman chronically underestimated in a male dominated field. A listener rather than a grandstand. A consensus builder at a time of polarization.

The greatest asset of Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, who is positioning herself to become Germany's next leader, is that she is widely regarded as Merkel's choice for the post. This is also his biggest responsibility.

The race for Chancellor of Waiting will end early next month with a vote at the annual convention of the ruling Christian Democratic Union. This is a referendum on Merkel's 13th birthday, with the legacy of the Chancellor and the orientation of Europe's largest economy on the scene.

If Kramp-Karrenbauer is chosen, Merkelism will live in Germany and Merkel will have a chance to take a gradual and graceful exit, eventually ending her fourth full term as Chancellor before retiring in 2021.

But the success of one of the other main contenders would put Germany on a different path: to put an end to moderation in the manner of Merkel in favor of ideologically committed conservatism, and to a potentially disordered rejection of the woman who was one of the most important modern leaders of Europe.

We do not know in which direction the 1,001 party delegates will swing. Merkel has long held the undisputed dominance of the CDU. But the reaction of its 2015 decision to allow more than one million asylum seekers has collapsed.

Faced with the decline in polls and internal discontent of the party, Merkel announced late last May that she would not seek a new term as leader of the party. Alongside Kramp Karrenbauer, two critics of the party's right flank, one of the CDU party leaders, Friedrich Merz, and Health Minister Jens Spahn, quickly jumped into a very uncertain race to determine who will lead Germany.

Merkel, 64, has not officially approved a candidate. But Kramp-Karrenbauer, 56 – whose crooked name, even for the Germans, often gives way to the simple AKK or "mini-Merkel" – is widely perceived as the Chancellor's choice. Merkel appointed her as the party's general secretary in the spring, a position that earned her his first wife.

Even supporters acknowledge that Merkel's blessing is mixed.

Annegret, "said Karl Rauber, a close friend of Kramp-Karrenbauer in the CDU, who has known her for decades," The problem is that people do not want things to continue as they are, they want changes. "

Surveys of CDU members show that Merz and Kramp-Karrenbauer meet side by side, while Spahn is far behind.

Kramp-Karrenbauer launched his campaign last week in Berlin and declared the "end of an era" defined by Merkel – and defended a characteristic pragmatic line in his speech to know how to follow it.

"Such a time can not be simply pursued or reversed," she said. "The decisive question is what do you do with what you have inherited."

If Kramp-Karrenbauer were to win the CDU vote, it would limit an increase almost as unlikely as Merkel's meteoric rise of an unknown physicist from East Germany at the head of the dominant party in the aftermath. war in Germany in just 10 years.

Kramp-Karrenbauer has little experience in the difficult phases of German national politics. Instead, she spent most of her career in the tiny western Saarland, literally and figuratively located the same distance from Berlin. With only 1 million inhabitants, it is the second smallest state in the country. Even its largest city, Saarbrücken, has the comforts of a remote provincial capital – exactly what it is.

"Can she take care of the transition from Saarland to Berlin?", Said Daniel Kirch, political correspondent for the region's leading regional newspaper, the Saarbrücker Zeitung. "That's the million dollar question."

In Saarland, where she held the post of prime minister for seven years, she has legions of admirers and few enemies. Even his political opponents attribute to him a style of consensual governance.

Yet, few people say they have ever seen them as a person with the qualities of a future Chancellor.

"She is very humble and very kind and you would not necessarily think she is ambitious," said Kirch. "But you do not go where she is without being very ambitious."

Second youngest of seven siblings, Kramp-Karrenbauer grew up in Püttlingen, a modest town near the French border that was hit hard in his youth by the closure of coal mines where his ancestors have been working for generations.

The family was deeply Catholic and conservative. His mother ran the house while his father was director of a school for children with intellectual disabilities. (Merkel's father was a Lutheran pastor in a home for the disabled.)

Kramp-Karrenbauer would passionately discuss politics with her father, even though she shared many of her points of view, said Hans-Guenther Kramp, an older brother. She was studious and sang in the church choir, while tasting a slightly harder music, including the AC / DC metal band.

"She would be fighting with our younger brother to find out which band was the best," said Kramp, who, like three of his four surviving siblings, still lives in Püttlingen. "But she would always let him finish his arguments before it was decided that both groups were equally good.

"She does it in politics too. This is his virtue.

It can also be solved when the principle is at stake, say those who know it for the longest time.

When the local branch of the German Communist Party invited a Soviet official to the Püttlingen town hall in the late 1970s, Kramp-Karrenbauer and his young CDU activists built a replica of the Berlin Wall in front of the building – forcing the head of embarrassing maneuver around him. on entering, said Rudolf Müller, a former mayor.

As a young member of Püttlingen City Council, Kramp-Karrenbauer was initially greeted with skepticism in a room dominated by older men, Müller said. But she convinced them by putting in place a very effective program to help laid-off workers.

"She really listened and spoke only when she had something to say," said Müller, who has led the city for 27 years. "It took time to convince them, but she did."

In a conservative party, some were still upset by the way she balanced the demands of her career and motherhood. She accepted an acting appointment to the German Parliament just days after the birth of one of her sons and participated in the debates with a baby in her arms. Her husband, a mining engineer, took leave to take care of their three children.

Petra Berg, a leader of the center-left Social Democrats of Saarland, said that Kramp-Karrenbauer was not taken seriously by his male rivals. Merkel must also know this feeling. But Berg said the similarities between the two go far beyond the genre.

"It's too simplistic to say they have a connection because they are two women," she said. "The fact is that they have very similar personalities. That's what binds them. "

Like Merkel, Kramp-Karrenbauer is reluctant to make a hasty decision, preferring to wait until she has examined all available data and talked to everyone involved.

It was an approach that served him well in Saarland, where one of his first tasks after becoming Prime Minister was to cut the state budget by 10%.

What could have been a political poison became the path of a pair of decisive victories during reelection. Kramp-Karrenbauer convened round tables to collectively agree on how to proceed with these reductions. Participants attributed a fair process even when it was painful.

"She's not like other politicians in these situations. It is very clear, "said Volker Linneweber, former president of the University of Saarland. She said, "I do not promise anything I can not deliver. "

Although Kramp-Karrenbauer left her party economically, she appealed to the right on cultural issues. She opposed same sex marriage when Parliament approved it last year. She also advocated a firm approach to asylum seekers, including mandatory age tests for those who claim to be minors.

But it is unclear whether this will be enough for the conservative wing of a party that aspires to regain its ideological roots after more than a decade of encampment in the center.

With respect to refugee policy in particular, Kramp-Karrenbauer has not gone as far as many conservatives would like. She maintained Merkel's decision to keep the country's borders open in 2015-2016, while affirming, as Merkel does, that the influx should not be repeated.

"I have a lot of respect for AKK and I consider it a political and political figure," said Stefan Rabel, who heads the CDU in Völkingen, Saarland, and advocates a more restrictive approach to the issue. immigration. "But after so many years of Merkel, the party wants a real change."

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