On Thursday morning there will be a direct meeting in the House of Representatives between Prime Minister Kai Wegner (CDU) and his currently most promising challenger in the Berlin election on September 20th, Elif Eralp (Left Party). The reason: Wegner has announced a government statement at the beginning of the meeting on the consequences of the attack on the power grid and the subsequent day-long blackout in southwest Berlin; Eralp is to speak about this in the following round of speeches.
Responding to a government statement is usually a matter for the boss. In the case of the Left Party, this would be the task of the chairmen Anne Helm and Tobias Schulze – Eralp is only one of two deputies in the parliamentary group leadership. Letting her speak is supposed to be her, The top candidate for the House of Representatives election since mid-Novembernoticeably also in parliament the opportunity to take a position against Wegner.
The press office of the left-wing faction highlighted this in the title of a press release for the plenary session: “Eralp responds to Wegner”. So far, the two have hardly met each other in speeches: Eralp is her parliamentary group’s specialist spokesperson for the topics of migration, participation and anti-discrimination, while Wegner is at the executive level in the parliamentary hierarchy.
In the case of the Greens, it is not necessary for the current parliamentary group leadership to free up the prominent speaking place with a view to the election: the two chairmen Werner Graf and Bettina Jarasch are also the two co-leading candidates for September 20th.
One person, however, will not be able to use the round of speeches from shortly after ten o’clock as a podium: SPD leading candidate Steffen Krach is not a member of parliament and therefore cannot represent the Social Democratic faction led by Raed Saleh on the microphone.
Wegner is not yet officially the CDU’s top candidate
A formality could still become significant: While Eralp, Krach and the two Greens have already been elected as top candidates by their parties, as has the AfD parliamentary group leader Kristin Brinker, this is still pending for Wegner and the CDU. At the most recent state party conference at the end of September it was said on the sidelinesthat will happen in the spring.
At that time, however, the CDU got 25 percent in a survey and was six points ahead of Eralp’s Left Party. In November it was only 22 percent and 3 points ahead. And it is still unclear how much the debate about Wegner’s behavior at the beginning of the power outage and his tennis game in the meantime cost the CDU.
Against this background, the supposed formality means: If the CDU does not want to go into the election with a Wegner at the top who may be too damaged in its eyes, it would at least not have to overturn a party conference resolution to do so. Wegner probably doesn’t just have to convince the public of himself on Thursday morning: it could be just as crucial for him to use his speech to get his own CDU MPs behind him – again.