No experiments: Armin Laschet is elected leader of Germany’s CDU
The moderate Rhinelander is now front-runner to succeed Angela Merkel as chancellor.
“Keine Experimente” (no experiments) ran the political slogan of Konrad Adenauer. The co-founder and first leader of the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the postwar Federal Republic of Germany’s first chancellor was a Catholic moderate from the Rhineland who conceived of his party’s role as bridging divides between different segments of society and offering stability, consensus and restraint. The formula has served the party well: it has governed the federal republic for 51 of its 71 years.