3/3 - Can This Woman Save Europe?

Annegret KrampKarrenbauer is likely to succeed Angela Merkel. She just has to convince voters she can stand on her own

- Arne Delfs, Patrick Donahue, and David Rocks

The annual Ash Wednesday political roast in the Northern German town of Demmin is classic partisan shtick: Beer flows freely, the aroma of sausage fills the air, and assembled grandees make lame jokes about their rivals. Chancellor Angela Merkel had been a regular at the event for two decades, but this year she skipped it, ceding the headline spot to her handpicked successor as leader of the country’s ruling Christian Democratic Union, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer.

A slight woman with a pixie haircut, Kramp-Karrenbauer—whose name is routinely shortened to AKK—was elected in December to succeed Merkel at the helm of Germany’s center-right party. While Merkel remains chancellor, this puts AKK in line to take over for the longtime ruler in 2021, when Merkel’s term ends, or sooner if she’s forced out.

Since assuming the leadership, AKK, 56, has stormed across Germany’s political landscape, seeking to establish her bona fides with conservatives put off by the CDU’s leftward drift and to shed her image as a Merkel disciple. Her fiery speech in Demmin couldn’t have been more different from Merkel’s usual plodding rhetoric. Already under attack for an off-color joke she’d made at an event a few days earlier—about Berlin’s culture of “third-sex bathrooms, for men who don’t know whether they should stand or sit while peeing”—AKK raised the stakes by further ripping into political correctness. Requiring people to “weigh every word on a jeweler’s scale” threatens to quash robust debate and destroy cherished traditions, she said. In response to news reports about a Hamburg school that had barred students from wearing American Indian costumes, she roared, “I want to live in a country that allows children to be children, to dress like Indians.” The crowd erupted in applause.