It’s true that surveys show Kramp-Karrenbauer’s vague policy agenda is highly popular with Social Democrats and Greens (the latter who have benefited in recent years from the SPD’s Merkel-fueled collapse). Greens polled by the weekly newsmagazine Der Spiegel viewed her even more positively (65 percent) than do CDU members (62 percent). “If the CDU elects a woman, and twice in a row,” a Berlin Green Party member told FP, “it shows that all of the other parties can too, but they’re not doing it. It shows them up.” With such star quality, Kramp-Karrenbauer might even prove able to demobilize the Greens in the same way Merkel did the SPD.
At the same time, many conservatives are hoping she can leverage her Catholic faith to win back far-right voters. Throughout her career, Kramp-Karrenbauer has been an avowed, if mild-mannered, social conservative: She’s on the record against same-sex marriage, and she firmly opposes any loosening of Germany’s relatively restrictive abortion laws; her rhetoric on migration policy—which has included the suggestion of sending refugees back to Syria—has occasionally fallen on the CDU’s far-right wing. Indeed, there’s little reason to believe that she would have initiated any of the openly liberal social policies that Merkel undertook in recent years, such as ending mandatory military conscription and initiating conciliatory dialogue between the government and Germany’s Muslim community.
This, however, is the hitch in the logic of Kramp-Karrenbauer as savior of the party and leader of a more harmonious, united nation. The same surveys that show her fawned over by the left also show her rejected categorically by AfD voters and even seen as somewhat suspect by many traditional conservatives. In fact, only 4 percent of AfD backers in the Spiegel poll see her favorably. (SPD support for her is 10 times greater.) Just 2 percent of the AfD supporters surveyed said they believed that Kramp-Karrenbauer could lure back stray former CDU conservatives now voting AfD. Another poll yielded a similar result: AfD supporters were the least convinced of all the parties that she would unite the CDU. [...]
A political commentator for the conservative daily Die Welt, Susanne Gaschke, summed up the problem concisely: “From the beginning, there was hatred in certain circles for Angela Merkel, which had nothing at all to do with her policies. … The Merkel hatred of the past three years, in my opinion, has at least as much to do with frustrated masculinity as with concrete and legitimate questions about migration.” Just maybe, hopes Gaschke, Kramp-Karrenbauer will catch less of it than Merkel: “Perhaps it is enough that Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer has three children and neither Merkel nor East German.” Alas, nothing points in that direction now—on the contrary.
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