Berlin: The Frontrunner to replace Angela Merkel as German Chancellor is an experienced finance minister, but his opponent has a reputation as a king of comeback.
The race to replace Merkel has boiled to the competition between representatives of Chancellor Olaf Scholz from the Central Left Democrat and Armin Laschet from the Conservative Alliance of CDU-CSU Merkel.
Here are the two main pretends to the Merkel throne.
As Minister of Finance and Representative Chancellor below Merkel, Scholz is one of the most influential German politicians because of being very careful, confident and very ambitious.
He enjoyed close relations with Merkel and even tried to position himself as a true Merkel continuity candidate, which appeared on the cover of the Sueddeutsche Zeitung magazine who adopted the famous “split” hand movement.
Dubbed “Scholzomat” because of his robot’s speech, Scholz was hardly prominent because of the grew in the process of election and had admitted that he was “not a very emotional person in politics”.
But the 63-year-old child also benefited from not making embarrassing mistakes on the campaign lane.
When he was attacked by Laschet during the TV debate on the search for police conducted at the Ministry of Finance, Scholz kept a cool Laschet who accused “reversible facts”, and immediately chose the winner of the debate.
Born in the northern city of Osnabrueck, Scholz was trained as a lawyer and specialized in labor issues before being chosen to the national parliament in 1998.
He married fellow SPD Politicians Britta Ernst in the same year.
He was the Mayor of Hamburg for years, overseeing the development of the Elbphilharmonie concert hall which was very expensive but appreciated.
But in general, it is seen as a fiscal conservative and a famous German budget defender – an approach that sometimes makes it marginalized in his own worker party.
Scholz was ignored in leadership elections in 2019 supporting two relatively unknown left wings, but has had a superior SPD policy in the election campaign, supporting the planned wealth tax and increasing minimum wages.
The Laschet election campaign has been damaged by Gaffe, but Rhinelander Afflenle has a reputation for durability and what Der Spiegel magazine describes as the ability to “sit” his opponents – talent that might land the German top work.
CDU’s head wins the conservative nomination to become a Chancellor’s candidate after the battle compiled with Markus Soeder who is more popular than CSU, a bavarian cdu sister party.
Asked in a TV interview recently did he think he was often underestimated, Laschet answered that “many certainly miscalculations”.
Laschet was born in Aachen, a spa city in West Germany near the border with Belgium and the Netherlands where his father feeds a family of coal diggers.
“When you fall in the mine, it doesn’t matter where your colleagues come from, what is his religion or what he is.
The important thing is, can you rely on it,” he told the party colleagues earlier this year.
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Laschet, 60, has a reputation for pragmatism and the ability to unite, famous stand by Merkel during the fall of the 2015 German refugee flow.
“Easy polarization – anyone can do it,” he said at a party conference in January.
“We have to speak clearly, but not polarized.
We must be able to integrate.
Keep the community together and unite it, it is hard work.” Laschet hero is Charlemagne, King Frank which is credited with Uniting Europe whose Empire is based in Aachen, and his family even said they were direct descent.
The Father-of-Three was chosen as the German Bundestag parliament in 1994 and to the European Parliament in 1999, and has become North Rhine-Westphalia Prime Minister since 2017.