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Rifts emerge as German CDU seeks new leader

BERLIN: Latent tensions in Germany's opposition Christian Democrats, long suppressed by former patriarch Helmut Kohl, came out into the open on Sunday as conservatives and modernisers struggled over the party leadership.

The CDU's progressive General Secretary Angela Merkel won support from two regional party branches at the weekend to succeed party leader Wolfgang Schaeuble, who resigned last week over a funding scandal surrounding Kohl.

But some CDU grandees backed former Defence Minister Volker Ruehe, who is trying to keep his leadership chances alive as he faces the verdict of angry voters in an election in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein next Sunday.

Merkel, 45, said she was ready to let the grassroots give their verdict after receiving a jubilant reception on Friday at a CDU rally in Lower Saxony and winning the endorsement of the party in the city-state of Hamburg on Saturday.

"The party executive agreed to involve the membership in the (selection) process," she told Focus magazine in an interview. "I have always said that the opinion-forming process should come more from below."

RUEHE ALLIES WEIGH IN

Merkel, a Protestant from the former East Germany, is regarded with deep scepticism in the Catholic, conservative South - and in particular by the CDU's Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union led by Edmund Stoiber.

With elder statesmen Bernhard Vogel and Kurt Biedenkopf appearing to rule themselves out as potential interim leaders, support from the conservative flank of the party mounted for the experienced Ruehe, 57.

"I think Volker Ruehe is just as suitable as Angela Merkel or even Bernhard Vogel or Kurt Biedenkopf," Baden-Wuerttemberg's CDU state premier Erwin Teufel told Welt am Sonntag newspaper in one of several endorsements.

Ruehe, who has seen a double-digit opinion poll lead vanish since Kohl admitted taking illicit donations and running secret slush funds during his 16 years as chancellor which ended in 1998, kept his options open.

"If I can improve the self-confidence of the CDU through a success in (Schleswig-Holstein) that would strengthen and broaden my chances to play a leadership role," Ruehe told Welt am Sonntag.

The leadership plans to nominate its preferred contender on March 20 for election by the party's annual conference in April.

Commentators said the selection process marked a fundamental change in the CDU's culture as it lifts a gag on internal debate enforced by Kohl during his quarter-century as party leader.

"The CDU from below: It will quickly become clear from the regional party conferences who is the right person to lead the party," the liberal Tagesspiegel commented. "But that assumes the grass roots seize their independence and do not behave like a fan club."

Kohl, meanwhile, faced the humiliating prospect of police searching his home and office after his admissions of illegally accepting $1 million in secret donations, Der Spiegel weekly reported.

A spokesman for the Bonn state prosecutor's office, which has launched a criminal probe against Kohl over his role in the funding scandal, declined to comment on the Spiegel report-Reuters